There's an 'interesting' economic problem and endgame in full automation too, most humans aren't 'earning' [except the ones twiddling the robotic controls, that can be done by other robots too] and so they don't have any wages to 'consume'. The utopian 1950s view of this was vastly increased leisure, flying cars and people in white togas. The 2000s view is probably a vast undernourished resentful underclass and maximised value for 'shareholders'.
Oh well, I guess the world just fills up with robot-prduced Barbies [tm] in big warehouses and the masses east kibble [tm], three meals, every day.
i use the Phone Coop http://www.thephone.coop/ for my phone and internet. So now my banking is a coop, my ISP is a coop and I shop at the Coop [mainly]. This is my way of dealing with hyper-capitalism. They're not the cheapest but they're not a bad ISP either and if you're a coop member, you'll get a little money back.
Yes, do so agree, at London borough [district probably in the US] level, perfectly adequate PCs are 'refreshed'/dumped because 'they' don't know how to manage viruses, huge roaming profiles etc. etc. the next-door borough nearly went to Linux and then backed away. Without being an open-source nut, this would certainly be a healthy part of a solution. We already believe in 'mixed' economy don't we, so this isn't much of a reach.
I'm fairly hard-core, so I apply [what I call] the 'walk away' test to everything. That is: 'can I take my data and set up another instance of x on infrastructure that I control?'.
As far as I'm concerned both protocols and APIs, even if published, are potential lock in, I prefer to have the whole stack and my data -available-, even if I'm not going to move every month.
I deal with a certain amount of non-tech-savvy non-profits in the UK who end up glued to apparently 'free' stuff, because they don't understand this.
I do so agree with this, please mod up. In the 1970s, at the time of the Club of Rome, we discussed overpopulation, now, except for China, it's off the radar. Why is that? We don't need more food, we need less people.
Yes agree, I made good money in an investment bank in London as a web and infrastructure guy but compared to testosterone fueled idiots on the floor, it was fairly insignificant. I'm happy to be out, though I made a lot of geeky friends there.
So I think the tenor of the original is good, we don't need to contribute to this and, if we leave in droves, they don't know how to do it without our help. Hey, it's just optimistic science fiction!
Actually, when I went into computing in about 1974, there weren't really any IT degrees. So I studied chemistry [at Imperial in London] and then went into IT, because I liked it. So it depends on age as well.
I did do a foundation and an Msc in my mid forties which I really enjoyed and gave some extra confidence with deeper technical things [database design rather than managing projects and hacking code] but the 30-odd years gave me a lot of crystallized knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence [sorry about wikipedia, quickest one I could find] that helped a lot.
For example, I could/can take a quick look at something and have a fair idea whether it's a disaster waiting to happen. Not always right, but the score is pretty good. This is not because I'm especially smart, it's just that I've seen a lot of random stuff.
Thanks, I was going to point this out. The middle class who have a little more cash have all the comparison shopping sites at their fingertips [I switched my utilities twice in the last three years, for example].
But my folks, who could really do with these savings, don't have access and don't currently have the skills to compare on-line. This stuff isn't discretionary purchase, it's gas, electricity, insurance etc. etc.
Sorry, wasn't clear enough, I meant training in general, not training for Windows or ex-Windows users. Many of my pupils are older, from east London boroughs, english as second language and fairly low literacy skills and they find the web quite hard.
I live in the East End of London and am already involved in this kind of approach, but on a small scale and informally. So I think it's a a pretty good approach to supply of the basics and a better way than just stripping down perfectly viable PCs.
But, the big but, is training and support. Here Linux [we're mainly Ubuntu and variants] is slightly better because it doesn't get trashed by viruses immediately and file permissions etc. make things easier to lock down. However, I've spent 7 years on/off training people and the web, email, looking for stuff, deciding whether to trust sites etc etc. is NOT intuitive and searching, especially, is a hard subject.
So, without training, many of these PC will be underused and languish, as so many provided under various schemes do now. We prefer drop-ins currently, they're more sociable and mean you can train/help several people at once and they can provide peer support and discovery. Also, the connections can be consolidated and needn't go through mobile networks.
People like derivatives traders take that to the purest level, trading fairly abstract things, but still things with an attachment, however tenuous, to the real world.
That's exactly one of my major points, 'abstract things' and [I would say, because I'm arguing on that side of this] no connection to changes in value in the real world, within the 126 microsecond slice.
I agree completely about leverage and hence about fractional reserve and the major of money being issued as debt. This whole thing is due for an major re-think, it's part of what's destroying us.
There's a huge problem with the word 'value' in the above.
To declare interest, I'm ex-investment banking and not too proud of it. The 'values' and 'derivatives' exchanged are often not mapped to anything happening in the 'real' world [think manufacturing, [useful] services even], however they do have a negative impact on it [factory closures, bank bailouts paid by the taxpayer, for example].
Try a thought experiment, does anything useful change in 126 microseconds? Bread get baked? Pizza cooked? House built? Seed planted, if you want to get rural and idyllic?
Incidentally, I'm not against simple futures, for example, they smooth the farmer's year and have a purpose. I am pretty much against most exotic financial derivatives and against short-term [126 microseconds, for example!] 'investment' to use ironic quotes...
This goes back even to the 1970s and 1960s. ICL, the British computer manufacturer would rent or sell a printer that was made artificially slow for one price, remove a couple of resistors and then the 'customer' had a faster printer at a new higher price.
Personally, I think that shows that the 'invisible hand' doesn't deliver more and more prosperity to the human race, something that the more enlightened economists such as Stiglitz are beginning to say aloud. This kind of activity shows that in many areas the 'market' is failed religion or illusion with lots of followers still clinging on.
Just want to go 'me too' to say that this is a great post. I'm 60 this year, did a lot of COBOL, some C, now do Perl [critics would say this is increasing the probability of early dementia, but I love it] and I believe the main thing about programming is programming and [importantly] development, especially clean development cycles etc. not the specific language.
I make quite a decent living from Perl because, like COBOL a) it's legacy and b) there's still a lot of it around to be maintained.
'm a Perl person, so many will say I shouldn't comment on this at all. I've spent about 35 years 'sweating over a hot computer' as someone once said and I still enjoy a lot of it, although I've partially retired.
If you read the history, BASIC was designed to give access to computers to non-techies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC and this is the one belief that uncle Bill [we can't say his name here, can we?] and I share.
I showed my son some basic BASIC stuff on an Oric Atmos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_Computer_Systems in about 1988 [the dates in wikipedia don't seem quite right] mainly:
10 PRINT "HELLO" ;
GOTO 10;
as he was quite small. He's been programming pretty much, ever since, but he grew up around it too.
I'm not going to get into a flame war about GOTO or Basic in general, but script languages and some of the open source Basics that are left are pretty good. I've been teaching a neighbour some Perl too, at about this level. I wouldn't try and teach them PHP before doing some of this more 'linear' stuff either. I've been experimenting with Scratch and especially etoys: http://www.squeakland.org/ and I really like the visual object model but, if you're an adult, you can't use it for simple accounting for example or parsing a file. So a lot will depend on intended purpose and age of pupil as previous posters have said.
That's the beauty of it, anyway if you don't want to code, I'm sure there's Do::Anything somewhere on CPAN, to my mind still a 'killer' reason for Perl.
First, to declare interest, I'm a financial reform activist and proud 'owner' of an open source project supporting mutual social credit and local cash style systems: http://www.hughbarnard.org/content/alternative-currency-software.
The good thing is near-zero transaction cost. However [for my view and vision] there are quite a few bads:
anonymity, this is a problem in the current banking world
governance and transparent are a much greater part of an exchange system than technical platform
ubiquity, coupled with anonymity, means that we stay in the current 'banking' paradigm, a real 'success' for inequality and ecology destruction
lack of mapping [for example to commodity basket, the gold standard is probably silly] means exponential growth in supply
peer to peer probably affects governance too and may [it did in certain parts of digicash] lead to race conditions
My own 'vision' is local exchange systems, so that we have greened logistics [short supply chains] and we know a lot of the people we do business with. This is not new or original, it's part of LETS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Exchange_Trading_Systems, the transition town vision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns and most of the projects that want to re-engineer finance to towards great equality and respect for the ecosphere.
Yes, exactly, one right thing doesn't compensate for a wrong thing. It's more useful just to stop doing the wrong thing, a nettle that so-called corporate social responsibility hasn't even started to grasp...
As for the event itself, I now call these things generically 'open season' where large organisations and corporations try and suck stuff from the naive in the name of 'good' and 'open source'. It's why there aren't any of we hippies left now, same thing happened...
The end point of this is to take back both banking and control of currency into a more responsible and democratic sphere. This will probably only be partially achieved but will give a healthier mix of monetary control and resilience than at present. Meanwhile, I'm hoping and working towards a stage where some of this can be used for, at the least, running Credit Unions. There is a lot of Credit Union software [at least inthe UK] but all of it is closed-source, expensive and tends to be Microsoft-oriented.
I marked this related because it isn't an answer to the OP, but it's an important related and more radical part of the subject.
As an older person, this question makes me a little sad. No-one should need an extra persona for their job, although, I know the reality is somewhat different.
Try and find a decent company [really hard, I've had at least two bosses who were actually mad], work hard [but don't kill yourself] and support and be sensitive to the people around you. There's usually tons of cues about dress, formality/informality, approach coming in every moment, so look listen and learn.
Actually I've often found that really talented anoraks [I don't count myself as one, incidentally] are good people to work with, because they like what they do and get to do it every day. The ones with loads of attitude aren't usually the talented ones.
I'm nearly 60 [although most of my life has been spent with computers], I hated Facebook from inception, it 'felt' shallow and stupid and something that made friendship a commodity. Also I didn't [and don't] like the constantly changing privacy and ownership 'landscape'.
So, since I have a green agenda, I've helped a group in East London implement an Elgg instance for my fellow greenies: http://www.hackney-environment-network.org.uk/ like a credit union, mamy of these people have a common bond with myself.
I'm hoping that these smaller and sometimes subject oriented groupings may be part of the social network future. A missing piece is an ethical, open-source, privacy preserving consolidator though. One reason I chose Elgg was for the 'promise' of OpenSocial: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
Did anyone notice, everyone is so busy squabbling that no-one really answered the question?
I'm 60 this year and have the same problem, I got quite a long way in that I studied some quantum machanics about 40 years ago. As i'm in the UK, I'll probably do an Open University course: http://mathschoices.open.ac.uk/routes/p5/index.html I'm not sure what the equivalent institution is elsewhere.
I agree, the actual proposal is ridiculous (although we run Dan's Guardian in a drop-in to protect kids using it, makes us hypocrites...) but I'm thinking about the philosophy behind it.
My ideal is that every citizen has a level of education and ethical-compass where they can do all this 'work' themselves. But, actually, I have seen standards going down in the UK, not old-person grumpiness, I really wish they hadn't.,,
As standards decline there's less protection at individual level against 'trash'.
Slashdot Mirror
All you young'uns read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano when you've finally got off my lawn.
There's an 'interesting' economic problem and endgame in full automation too, most humans aren't 'earning' [except the ones twiddling the robotic controls, that can be done by other robots too] and so they don't have any wages to 'consume'. The utopian 1950s view of this was vastly increased leisure, flying cars and people in white togas. The 2000s view is probably a vast undernourished resentful underclass and maximised value for 'shareholders'.
Oh well, I guess the world just fills up with robot-prduced Barbies [tm] in big warehouses and the masses east kibble [tm], three meals, every day.
i use the Phone Coop http://www.thephone.coop/ for my phone and internet. So now my banking is a coop, my ISP is a coop and I shop at the Coop [mainly]. This is my way of dealing with hyper-capitalism. They're not the cheapest but they're not a bad ISP either and if you're a coop member, you'll get a little money back.
Yes, do so agree, at London borough [district probably in the US] level, perfectly adequate PCs are 'refreshed'/dumped because 'they' don't know how to manage viruses, huge roaming profiles etc. etc. the next-door borough nearly went to Linux and then backed away. Without being an open-source nut, this would certainly be a healthy part of a solution. We already believe in 'mixed' economy don't we, so this isn't much of a reach.
I'm fairly hard-core, so I apply [what I call] the 'walk away' test to everything. That is: 'can I take my data and set up another instance of x on infrastructure that I control?'.
As far as I'm concerned both protocols and APIs, even if published, are potential lock in, I prefer to have the whole stack and my data -available-, even if I'm not going to move every month.
I deal with a certain amount of non-tech-savvy non-profits in the UK who end up glued to apparently 'free' stuff, because they don't understand this.
Armadillo licking parties, science spoils everything. I wondered why I couldn't feel my tongue recently...
I do so agree with this, please mod up. In the 1970s, at the time of the Club of Rome, we discussed overpopulation, now, except for China, it's off the radar. Why is that? We don't need more food, we need less people.
Yes agree, I made good money in an investment bank in London as a web and infrastructure guy but compared to testosterone fueled idiots on the floor, it was fairly insignificant. I'm happy to be out, though I made a lot of geeky friends there.
So I think the tenor of the original is good, we don't need to contribute to this and, if we leave in droves, they don't know how to do it without our help. Hey, it's just optimistic science fiction!
Actually, when I went into computing in about 1974, there weren't really any IT degrees. So I studied chemistry [at Imperial in London] and then went into IT, because I liked it. So it depends on age as well.
I did do a foundation and an Msc in my mid forties which I really enjoyed and gave some extra confidence with deeper technical things [database design rather than managing projects and hacking code] but the 30-odd years gave me a lot of crystallized knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence [sorry about wikipedia, quickest one I could find] that helped a lot.
For example, I could/can take a quick look at something and have a fair idea whether it's a disaster waiting to happen. Not always right, but the score is pretty good. This is not because I'm especially smart, it's just that I've seen a lot of random stuff.
Well, it's a numbers game not an ethics game. If there are a few of them and they're not likely to be noisy, then **** 'em.
Incidentally, this is why [apart from being old] I prefer my books as books and not digital artifacts controlled by Amazon etc. etc.
Thanks, I was going to point this out. The middle class who have a little more cash have all the comparison shopping sites at their fingertips [I switched my utilities twice in the last three years, for example].
But my folks, who could really do with these savings, don't have access and don't currently have the skills to compare on-line. This stuff isn't discretionary purchase, it's gas, electricity, insurance etc. etc.
Sorry, wasn't clear enough, I meant training in general, not training for Windows or ex-Windows users. Many of my pupils are older, from east London boroughs, english as second language and fairly low literacy skills and they find the web quite hard.
To me, that's fair enough.
I live in the East End of London and am already involved in this kind of approach, but on a small scale and informally. So I think it's a a pretty good approach to supply of the basics and a better way than just stripping down perfectly viable PCs.
But, the big but, is training and support. Here Linux [we're mainly Ubuntu and variants] is slightly better because it doesn't get trashed by viruses immediately and file permissions etc. make things easier to lock down. However, I've spent 7 years on/off training people and the web, email, looking for stuff, deciding whether to trust sites etc etc. is NOT intuitive and searching, especially, is a hard subject.
So, without training, many of these PC will be underused and languish, as so many provided under various schemes do now. We prefer drop-ins currently, they're more sociable and mean you can train/help several people at once and they can provide peer support and discovery. Also, the connections can be consolidated and needn't go through mobile networks.
Just my 2p [that's a pence, non-UK folk] on this.
That's exactly one of my major points, 'abstract things' and [I would say, because I'm arguing on that side of this] no connection to changes in value in the real world, within the 126 microsecond slice.
I agree completely about leverage and hence about fractional reserve and the major of money being issued as debt. This whole thing is due for an major re-think, it's part of what's destroying us.
There's a huge problem with the word 'value' in the above.
To declare interest, I'm ex-investment banking and not too proud of it. The 'values' and 'derivatives' exchanged are often not mapped to anything happening in the 'real' world [think manufacturing, [useful] services even], however they do have a negative impact on it [factory closures, bank bailouts paid by the taxpayer, for example].
Try a thought experiment, does anything useful change in 126 microseconds? Bread get baked? Pizza cooked? House built? Seed planted, if you want to get rural and idyllic?
Incidentally, I'm not against simple futures, for example, they smooth the farmer's year and have a purpose. I am pretty much against most exotic financial derivatives and against short-term [126 microseconds, for example!] 'investment' to use ironic quotes...
This goes back even to the 1970s and 1960s. ICL, the British computer manufacturer would rent or sell a printer that was made artificially slow for one price, remove a couple of resistors and then the 'customer' had a faster printer at a new higher price.
Personally, I think that shows that the 'invisible hand' doesn't deliver more and more prosperity to the human race, something that the more enlightened economists such as Stiglitz are beginning to say aloud. This kind of activity shows that in many areas the 'market' is failed religion or illusion with lots of followers still clinging on.
Just want to go 'me too' to say that this is a great post. I'm 60 this year, did a lot of COBOL, some C, now do Perl [critics would say this is increasing the probability of early dementia, but I love it] and I believe the main thing about programming is programming and [importantly] development, especially clean development cycles etc. not the specific language.
I make quite a decent living from Perl because, like COBOL a) it's legacy and b) there's still a lot of it around to be maintained.
'm a Perl person, so many will say I shouldn't comment on this at all. I've spent about 35 years 'sweating over a hot computer' as someone once said and I still enjoy a lot of it, although I've partially retired.
If you read the history, BASIC was designed to give access to computers to non-techies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC and this is the one belief that uncle Bill [we can't say his name here, can we?] and I share.
I showed my son some basic BASIC stuff on an Oric Atmos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_Computer_Systems in about 1988 [the dates in wikipedia don't seem quite right] mainly: 10 PRINT "HELLO" ; GOTO 10; as he was quite small. He's been programming pretty much, ever since, but he grew up around it too.
I'm not going to get into a flame war about GOTO or Basic in general, but script languages and some of the open source Basics that are left are pretty good. I've been teaching a neighbour some Perl too, at about this level. I wouldn't try and teach them PHP before doing some of this more 'linear' stuff either. I've been experimenting with Scratch and especially etoys: http://www.squeakland.org/ and I really like the visual object model but, if you're an adult, you can't use it for simple accounting for example or parsing a file. So a lot will depend on intended purpose and age of pupil as previous posters have said.
That's the beauty of it, anyway if you don't want to code, I'm sure there's Do::Anything somewhere on CPAN, to my mind still a 'killer' reason for Perl.
My own 'vision' is local exchange systems, so that we have greened logistics [short supply chains] and we know a lot of the people we do business with. This is not new or original, it's part of LETS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Exchange_Trading_Systems, the transition town vision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns and most of the projects that want to re-engineer finance to towards great equality and respect for the ecosphere.
Yes, exactly, one right thing doesn't compensate for a wrong thing. It's more useful just to stop doing the wrong thing, a nettle that so-called corporate social responsibility hasn't even started to grasp...
As for the event itself, I now call these things generically 'open season' where large organisations and corporations try and suck stuff from the naive in the name of 'good' and 'open source'. It's why there aren't any of we hippies left now, same thing happened...
I'm one of a number of people working on software for mutual credit systems (LETS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Exchange_Trading_Systems ) and alternative money and local currency systems, especially within the context of transition towns: http://www.transitiontowns.org/
There's a list of software, including mine, Cclite: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cclite/, at the end of the wikipedia article.
The end point of this is to take back both banking and control of currency into a more responsible and democratic sphere. This will probably only be partially achieved but will give a healthier mix of monetary control and resilience than at present. Meanwhile, I'm hoping and working towards a stage where some of this can be used for, at the least, running Credit Unions. There is a lot of Credit Union software [at least inthe UK] but all of it is closed-source, expensive and tends to be Microsoft-oriented.
I marked this related because it isn't an answer to the OP, but it's an important related and more radical part of the subject.
As an older person, this question makes me a little sad. No-one should need an extra persona for their job, although, I know the reality is somewhat different.
Try and find a decent company [really hard, I've had at least two bosses who were actually mad], work hard [but don't kill yourself] and support and be sensitive to the people around you. There's usually tons of cues about dress, formality/informality, approach coming in every moment, so look listen and learn.
Actually I've often found that really talented anoraks [I don't count myself as one, incidentally] are good people to work with, because they like what they do and get to do it every day. The ones with loads of attitude aren't usually the talented ones.
I'm nearly 60 [although most of my life has been spent with computers], I hated Facebook from inception, it 'felt' shallow and stupid and something that made friendship a commodity. Also I didn't [and don't] like the constantly changing privacy and ownership 'landscape'.
So, since I have a green agenda, I've helped a group in East London implement an Elgg instance for my fellow greenies: http://www.hackney-environment-network.org.uk/ like a credit union, mamy of these people have a common bond with myself.
I'm hoping that these smaller and sometimes subject oriented groupings may be part of the social network future. A missing piece is an ethical, open-source, privacy preserving consolidator though. One reason I chose Elgg was for the 'promise' of OpenSocial: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
Did anyone notice, everyone is so busy squabbling that no-one really answered the question?
I'm 60 this year and have the same problem, I got quite a long way in that I studied some quantum machanics about 40 years ago. As i'm in the UK, I'll probably do an Open University course: http://mathschoices.open.ac.uk/routes/p5/index.html I'm not sure what the equivalent institution is elsewhere.
I agree, the actual proposal is ridiculous (although we run Dan's Guardian in a drop-in to protect kids using it, makes us hypocrites...) but I'm thinking about the philosophy behind it.
My ideal is that every citizen has a level of education and ethical-compass where they can do all this 'work' themselves. But, actually, I have seen standards going down in the UK, not old-person grumpiness, I really wish they hadn't.,,
As standards decline there's less protection at individual level against 'trash'.