Something I first wrote in 2001: https://pdfernhout.net/open-le... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
So, CMU has been creating an artificial scarcity of the fruits of $100 million dollars in charitable donations in hopes they could make money for themselves out charging people for access to what they build with those charitable dollars. Of course we should be happy CMU has apparently now seen the error of their ways. But doesn't anyone else here see both the foolishness of the donors (including the government) to give money under such terms (see for example the "Bayh-Dole Act") and the previous immorality of CMU (and most other research universities)?
Whatever one thinks of the law, it is good to understand how the European Parliament is promoting it, as at that link: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
This is not in any way to defend that law, just to say it is useful to try to understand the mindset and world view behind it -- and how it was spun and sold.
While I agree a tax to link to something risks breaking the web (or at least the European part), here are some positive spins from the article about other aspects of copyright reform in the EU probably used to help sell the rest of the restrictions that otherwise seem to favor big publishers: "Uploading protected works for quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody or pastiche has been protected even more than it was before... It also stipulates that copyright restrictions will not apply to content used for teaching or illustration. Finally, the directive also allows copyrighted material to be used free-of-charge to preserve cultural heritage. Out-of-commerce works can be used where no collective management organisation exists that can issue a license."
Of course, what those sentences really mean in practice however they may seem to sound, I don't know.
https://www.goodreads.com/book... "The first sleep book by a leading scientific expertâ"Professor Matthew Walker, Director of UC Berkeleyâ(TM)s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab -- reveals his groundbreaking exploration of sleep, explaining how we can harness its transformative power to change our lives for the better.
Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when we don't sleep. Compared to the other basic drives in life -- eating, drinking, and reproducing -- the purpose of sleep remained elusive.
An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity.
Walker answers important questions about sleep: how do caffeine and alcohol affect sleep? What really happens during REM sleep? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? How do common sleep aids affect us and can they do long-term damage? Charting cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and synthesizing decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood, and energy levels; regulate hormones; prevent cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes; slow the effects of aging; increase longevity; enhance the education and lifespan of our children, and boost the efficiency, success, and productivity of our businesses. Clear-eyed, fascinating, and accessible, Why We Sleep is a crucial and illuminating book."
See also: "Lecture entitled "Why We Sleep" by Professor Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley." https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Maybe we should mandate all of these things too? Because there are hundreds of communicable diseases that all those protect people against -- not just measles.
https://www.drfuhrman.com/shop... "In Disease-Proof Your Child, Dr. Fuhrman details how a Nutritarian [vegetable-emphasizing etc.] diet increases a child's resistance to common childhood illnesses like asthma, ear infections, and allergies. He explains how eating a high-nutrient diet during childhood protects against developing chronic illness including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and autoimmune disorders."
https://www.everydayfamily.com... "What all of this means, unfortunately, is that while breastfeeding generally provides the most protection against measles for babies when they are newborns and up to six months, those antibodies wane as they baby gets older. Currently, the CDC doesn't recommend that infants get the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine until they are 12 months old, so babies who are my daughter's age â" 6 months â" are lacking in that protection."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... "It is now clear that vitamin D has important roles in addition to its classic effects on calcium and bone homeostasis. As the vitamin D receptor is expressed on immune cells (B cells, T cells and antigen presenting cells) and these immunologic cells are all are capable of synthesizing the active vitamin D metabolite, vitamin D has the capability of acting in an autocrine manner in a local immunologic milieu. Vitamin D can modulate the innate and adaptive immune responses. Deficiency in vitamin D is associated with increased autoimmunity as well as an increased susceptibility to infection. As immune cells in autoimmune diseases are responsive to the ameliorative effects of vitamin D, the beneficial effects of supplementing vitamin D deficient individuals with autoimmune disease may extend beyond the effects on bone and calcium homeostasis."
https://www.health.harvard.edu... "Just like a healthy diet, exercise can contribute to general good health and therefore to a healthy immune system. It may contribute even more directly by promoting good circulation, which allows the cells and substances of the immune system to move through the body freely and do their job efficiently...."
Adequate sleep is also important for immune function: https://valleysleepcenter.com/... "One reason our immune system function is so closely tied to our sleep is that certain disease-fighting substances are released or created while we sleep. Our bodies need these hormones, proteins, and chemicals in order to fight off disease and infection. Sleep deprivation, therefore, decreases the availability of these substances leaving us more susceptible to each new virus and bacteria we encounter. This can also cause us to being sick for a longer period of time as our bodies lack the resources to properly fight whatever it is that is making us sick."
If the logic of forced vaccination holds up, shouldn't we also be putting people in jail for giving children junk food -- as well as for producing or selling junk food consumed by children?
Or maybe we should jail people who are not getting enough sleep (e.g. people who stay up late reading Slashdot) and so are posing a health risk to everyone?
Or is that too slippery a slope for people here to consider?
Humor also boost the immune system. So maybe people who don't laugh enough should also be sent to jail as a health risk?:-) https://www.ncbi.nlm.ni
I recently learned a friend from college (probably) committed suicide several years ago, and like you I have spent a lot of time thinking about what were the causes and how it could have been prevented.
The key idea is to destigmatize asking for help due to suicidal thoughts by having our society view suicide as an *involuntary* act that occurs when pain exceeds coping resources. Anything that can reduce pain (including physical pain, but also social or emotional pain) or increase coping resources (such as emphatic listening) helps prevent suicide. Unfortunately, when suicide is seen in some other ways more common in our culture, the end result is often that more pain just tends to be heaped on existing pain when people reach out for help (so many people learn to avoid asking for help related to suicidal thoughts). So, David Conroy's reconceptualization makes sense to help caring individuals and organizations to think of ways to reduce pain and increase coping resources through daily activities for everyone and not mainly as some last ditch "suicide prevention" intervention.
David Conroy does make the point that limiting access to means or information is to an extent a "coping resource" so I doubt he would be against the Instagram move or cracking down on the groups you mention where people egg each other on.
But ultimately, progress is going to be best made by making people's lives happier and less painful day-to-day, and giving people a true sense that other people and society have their backs and want to help them. However, that is a much larger project than a few crackdowns like with Instagram.
"Out of the Nightmare. An all-out assault on the barriers that stand between you and recovery from depression and suicidal pain. decomposes recovery from depression into recovery from envy, shame, self-pity, grandiosity, fear, stigma, social abuse, and the double binds and vicious circles of the mythology of suicide. A drug-free approach to getting better and staying better. This book provides counselors with a bold new non-technical framework that is free from the prejudices that deter the suicidal from seeking help. It provides those who have lost a loved one to suicide with a broad array of new conceptual tools to understand the tragedy and to find help for stuck positions of bereavement. Most importantly, it provides all those who suffer from depression with hundreds of resources to find their way out of the nightmare."
A suicide by an employee or within the families of employees touches many lives and can significantly impact productivity. Along with advice for suicidal individuals, the book includes suggestion for first responders, counselors, friends, and those who sadly are survivors of someone else's suicide. A major focus of the book includes deconstructing harmful ideas surrounding how people often think about or respond to those who have suicidal ideation and suggesting a more effective way of thinking about suicide prevention called the aggregate pain model.
"Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. That's all it's about. You are not a bad person, or crazy, or weak, or flawed, because you feel suicidal. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die - it only means that you have more pain than you can cope with right now. If I start piling weights on your shoulders, you will eventually collapse if I add enough weights... no matter how much you want to remain standing. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Of course you would cheer yourself up, if you could. Don't accept it if someone tells you, "That's not enough to be suicidal about." There are many kinds of pain that may lead to suicide. Whether or not the pain is bearable may differ from person to person. What might be bearable to someone else, may not be bearable to you. The point at which the pain becomes unbearable depends on what kinds of coping resources you have. Individuals vary greatly in their capacity to withstand pain. When pain exceeds pain-coping resources, suicidal feelings are the result. Suicide is neither wrong nor right; it is not a defect of character; it is morally neutral. It is simply an imbalance of pain versus coping resources. You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible."
One of the fundamental challenges in an organization or society is to destigmatize asking for help to avoid the classic dillema those with suicidal thoughts face when they expect asking for help will only increase their pain from whatever reactions occur -- such as job loss or being ejected from a university community. By reconceptualizing suicide as an involuntary action that occurs when total pain exceeds resources for coping with pain, David Conroy provides a morally neutral way for organizations and society to think about suicide prevention in a productive way. Rather than focus mainly on intervening in a crisis, organizations can rethink their operations to reduce participant
In a post-scarcity world full of abundance of most basics and no big need to work if you don't want to (like with a basic income or a gift economy or 3D printers and personal robots), why do some unaesthetic and likely unpleasant thing to your brain like stick some hackable chip in it? Why not accept some reasonable limitations put in place by millions of years of evolution about how to have a stable mind and brain? Musk is missing the bigger post-scarcity picture here -- as are most technologists.
To give all your work history and work contact info to one centralized repository who can data mine everything about a society in a privileged way just seems like a huge social risk for our society -- the major reason I never joined it.
Something I wrote when Slashdot was a shiny new thing: https://pdfernhout.net/open-le... "executive summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
For good or bad, in the USA we live in a capitalist society with a (somewhat) free market. We can try to make the most of that because -- given appropriate regulation by the State and a fair distribution of purchasing power -- markets can work. See: "Planning Through the Market: More Equality Through the Market System" by G. William Domhoff https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.e... "Most importantly for our purposes, markets can be reconstructed to make it possible to plan for a more egalitarian economic future. It turns out it is possible for strong governments to use the market system for planning. Once it is realized that markets can be viewed from a governmental point of view as administrative instruments for planning, it can be seen that with a little reconfiguring they can serve collective purposes as well as the individual consumer preferences trumpeted by conservative free market economists. In this form of planning, the information is supplied by the price system that is so central to the considerable, but far from perfect, efficiency brought about by markets. There is thus no need for one big planning apparatus. Instead, the planning tools within a reconstructed market system are simply taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation. This point may seem very mundane, but these well-known government powers can be potent when applied to markets...."
Just like there are some good cars out there out there (e.g. Toyota Camry) and bad cars (e.g. Ford Pinto), there are some good private schools out there which can be beneficial to specific families with specific needs and interests and there are also some bad private schools. Even the same school can be good or bad for a family depending on circumstances. For example for an overall good school (especially for families with kids who are a little extroverted), consider the Albany Free School: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For parents who don't want to home educate (or otherwise can't do it for some reason), they could spend the $20k per child per year on private school instead. There would thus be a lot of money around to support alternative local private schools (like Montessori schools and child-directed Free schools as well as other types of schools). These schools would have to be very responsive to the needs of families in order to prosper given the potential for competition with all these other educational approaches and other private schools.
People choosing what they want to learn (and spending money on those choices) seems more compatible with a supposedly free-market capitalist society like the USA -- compared to what we have now with most young people being turned into standardized minds in government-owned "education" factories called schools (see my other comment on Prussian-inspired schools).
Local libraries might also be big beneficiaries from this shift. As John Taylor Gatto writes in "The Underground History of American Education", the "public" in public libraries means something very different than the "public" in public schools. Public libraries are inclusive institutions where you pick what you want to learn about on your own schedule and the librarian is not looking over your shoulder at everything you read. By contrast, public schools are only available to some people in the community (and exclude participation to everyone else) and, if you can enroll in them, are essentially mini surveillance states dictating what you learn and when you learn it (regardless of your individual needs or interests).
I's actually prefer a universal basic income over money spent just on families with children. But both of those solutions are in part about the same thing -- addressing a growing destructive rich-poor divide. Both capitalism and democracy can only function well when wealth is roughly evenly distributed across the society. Otherwise regulatory capture and
Some people of all backgrounds do bad things. Someone growing up badly is more likely to happen when parents and the community do not have enough resources to make time for kids and for each other -- since "it takes a village to raise a child well". So, making more money available to people outside of formal schooling seems (to me) to overall be likely to lead to a reduction in violence and other bad behavior across the board -- including by reducing stress levels. (A universal basic income would be another way to address this.)
The mostly forgotten purpose of Prussian-inspired schooling in according to Gatto is to turn children into obedient cannon fodder for a military empire. That includes increasing class and race prejudice in structural ways (e.g. the medium is the message, regardless of the content). Give public schools more money and they will only do that distasteful task even better.
So, without public schools derived from Prussian militaristic ambitions, would the USA overall -- including wars -- be a less violent nation?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The Prussian education system refers to the system of education established in Prussia as a result of educational reforms in the late 18th and early 19th century, which has had widespread influence since. It is predominantly used as an American political slogan in educational reform debates, since it was adopted by all American K-12 public schools and major universities as early as the late 18th century, and is often used as a derogatory term for education in the service of nation-building, teaching children and young adults blind obedience to authority, and reinforcing class and race prejudice. The actual Prussian education system was introduced as a basic concept in the late 18th century and was significantly enhanced after Prussia's defeat in the early stages of the Napoleonic Wars. The Prussian educational reforms inspired other countries and remains important as a biopower in the Foucaultian sense for nation-building. Compulsory education on the Prussian example was soon mirrored in Scandinavia, and United States started to adopt the Prussian example."
And in general, by John Taylor Gatto: https://archive.org/details/Th... "John Taylor Gatto is a former New York public schoolteacher who taught for thirty years and won multiple awards for his teaching. However, constant harassment by unhelpful administrations plus his own frustrations with what he came to realize were the inherent systemic deficiencies of our `public' schools led him to resign; he now is a school-choice activist who writes and speaks against our compulsory, government-run school system.
THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is a freewheeling investigation into the real - as opposed to the `official' - history of schooling, focused on the U.S. but with examinations of other historical examples for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, as well as for tracing where ideas and concepts related to education originated. You will discover things you were never told in the official version, things that will, at times, surprise, disgust, and scare you. You will also be introduced to the little-known historiography of the the darker side of the construction of compulsory government schooling.
In the final analysis, Gatto believes that compulsory, government-run schooling is inherently destructive to true education, the cultivation of self-reliance, and indeed to individualism - which used to be a defining element of the American character. The true purpose of our public school system in reality has more to do with control than it does with learning. This does not mean that rank-and-file teachers, principals, and even superintendents believe they are making students dumber, more conformist, less self-reliant, less capable of genuine analytical, independent thou
According to research cited in Matthew Walker's excellent book, teenagers shift their sleep schedule later by a couple of hours compared to their younger years. This may be because of evolutionary benefits to a tribe of having some people in a village awake to watch for danger when others sleep. A couple of unsupervised hours at night also provides a chance for teenagers to learn to operate independently from their parents while still being part of the family, village, and tribe. So, if you take a teenager who naturally may go to sleep close to midnight and wake up at 10am, and you force them to wake up a 6am to get to a 7am class, you are disrupting their natural sleep cycle which has all kinds of health an cognitive consequences (since naturally they will still stay up late and will thus get less sleep). Examples in the book include a huge reduction in car accidents in an area among teenagers who are better rested. Studies also show vastly better test scores for well-rested teens. Lack of sleep may also be contributing to the teen obesity crisis, the teen heart disease crisis, teen mental illness -- among other negative health impacts from lack of sleep.
As an additional complexity, some people are naturally "larks" (early morning risers, about 10%, according to link below) and some are naturally "night owls" (later risers, about 20%) while most others are "hummingbirds" in the middle. There is very little that can be done about this since this sleep preference is genetically determined to a significant degree -- although sleep schedule may change as we age as above. Caffeine may help some night owls get going anyway in the morning -- but there remains a significant health impact of getting too sleep -- since most night owls simply are not going to go to bed earlier even if they are forced to wake up earlier. https://www.nasw.org/users/lla...
People suffer if their sleep schedule does not reflect their natural cycle. So, forcing a night owl to perform early in the morning is just a bad idea -- whatever the person's age. Similarly, the cognitive performance of someone who stays up a few hours late or who gets a few hours too little sleep is typically similar to that of someone who is drunk -- which is why drowsy driving kills more people than drunk driving. If an early morning school schedule is terrible for a regular teenager, it is going to be even worse for a night owl.
If you have three kids, that is $60k a year. That is about the average household income in the USA. And since household income is often unevenly distributed between two working parents, even just $20k a year is about what one parent might be making, say, working at minimum wage at a convenience store (especially if not quite full time). And $20k a year would go a long way for some families otherwise living near the edge of poverty (especially in rural areas where the cost of living is generally lower). For farming families with a couple of kids, this money could mean the difference between a parent needing to work off the farm to bring in income (maybe with a long commute) or not.
There are so many free resources on the internet now (e.g. Khan Academy) that providing learning opportunities to children is much easier than it was decades ago. There's a difference between supervising a child's education and teaching everything yourself.
As more families homeschool, it becomes easier for all of them since there are more near-by families with kids around to interact with and share resources with. Also, with all that money in the hands of families with kids, they can afford things like educational travel, tutors, and learning center classes -- boosting those areas of the economy. And decent public school teacher could probably do as well financially working in those growing areas and would probably be a lot happier teaching only people who actively want to learn in those areas.
So, give the money directly to the parents to choose whatever educational options they think best (including homeschooling and private schools). See my essay on this from about a decade ago: https://www.pdfernhout.net/tow... "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not."
On why early start times are terrible teenagers: https://www.theguardian.com/bo... "The book bears a sobering and vital message, too, about the centrality of sleep to the proper development of young minds. Early school starting times - particularly in the US, where, barbarically, almost half of public high schools start before 7.20am - are disastrous for the mental health of teenagers. There is serious evidence, Walker suggests, for viewing lack of sleep as a factor in the onset of depression and schizophrenia."
If Amazon customer service and delivery quality is decreasing over time, wonder if this increasingly applies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is a non-fiction book by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, first published in 2007. It deals with cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and other cognitive biases, using these psychological theories to illustrate how the perpetrators (and victims) of hurtful acts justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes become polarized."
A microkernel like MINIX 3 has about 10,000 lines of code. The Linux Kernel has about 20,000,000 lines of code. If you mainly focus on getting only 10,000 lines right, you will have a lot less stress than trying to herd cats on 20,000x more code.
Ideally, for a core kernel maintainer, drivers should be mainly someone else's responsibility (with a separate vetting process) and should be firewalled from any service they don't absolutely need access to. A monolithic kernel just provides too much surface area for mischief to hide (whether intentional or unintentional).
See the list of "reliability policies" here for MINIX (I just included the titles of each section): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... * Reduce kernel size * Cage the bugs * Limit drivers' memory access * Survive bad pointers * Tame infinite loops * Limit damage from buffer overflows * Restrict access to kernel functions * Restrict access to I/O ports * Restrict communication with OS components * Reincarnate dead or sick drivers * Integrate interrupts and messages
Focusing a microkernel on a very small number of core services more closely adheres to Single Responsibility Principle compared to the Linux Kernel. That makes the overall kernel simpler to understand even if it may manage many drivers. See: https://www.infoq.com/presenta... "Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity's virtues over easiness', showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path."
It is probably harder to write a microkernel line-for-line compared to the same number of generally less sophisticated lines on average in a monolithic kernel -- but overall the system is much simpler and thus more reliable because the focused microkernel is easier to audit and test separate from all the drivers.
My suggestion is that if Linus Torvalds was focused primarily on the code quality of 10,000 lines of microkernel code he would be less stressed than worrying about the quality of 20,000x as much monolithic kernel code where any badness in those 20,000,000 lines of Linux kernel code could (if you load the driver) infect the whole. Even if Linus still used the same amount of profanity per line of hypothetical Linux microkernel code, his profanity level would still be reduced 10,000x and so essentially round to zero!:-)
Thanks for your comment, and while those are all good points, I feel they a missing the forest for the trees.
While you are right for one type of gift economy, there are at least two types of gift economy. The first is as you outlined about maintaining social status in a social network (like for some Native American tribes that used the Potlatch ceremony). But there is also another form (or aspect) of gift economy based around volunteering semi-anonymously to give back to the larger community -- like with all the people contributing comments to Slashdot for free, people who work on Wikipedia (for all its flaws), people who write FOSS, and so on. Certainly there can be mixes of the two motivations, so a complex topic. There are poor people now in an exchange-dominant economy and there might be status poor people in a gift economy (even if they get enough to eat).
You use the word "we" in your defense of the exchange economy. And I agree exchange transactions can have various benefits for specific individuals and so indirectly to societies. But the reason to soften the harshness of the exchange economy and all its contracts and so on is precisely because there is no "we" in it. Exchange is about individuals (or organizations) making contracts with each other -- usually ignoring externalities to other individuals (e.g. pollution, meltdown risk, market failure) or leaving many people out of the benefits (unless the government steps in with regulations and taxes and such). With a growing concentration of wealth and a growing rich/poor divide, and also with vast amounts of taxes going towards militarism to protect specific commercial interests (e.g. "War is a Racket"), "we" is a more and more problematical term to use in describing the benefits of a capitalist society. Thus ideas like "Social Credit" by C. H Douglas to overlay the exchange economy with a basic income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel"."
Most 3D printers are fairly limited today. We are still far away from Star Trek replicators. That said, they are getting better every year. And a big advantage of 3D printers, especially ones that print in metal or other durable materials, is that you no longer have to keep an inventory of mass-produced parts around "just in case". You can also make more efficient designs in terms of mass usage when multiple types of parts can be printed together in custom ways. Combine 3D printers with robots and CNC machine and mini forgers and so on in a small shop, and there is a lot of potential for people being able to opt out of a lot of exchange transactions (if maybe not all). Likewise, local knowledge and better sensors make it possible for people to avoid doctors and dentists to some degree (including by eating better or avoiding stresses and exercising more and getting more sleep so on) -- so another way or reducing the need for exchange by subsistence.
Yes there is the bike shed affect for planning in any organization, where less knowledgeable people focus on less important details while glossing over stuff that matters a lot more. But government programs still made it possible for Neil Armstrong to walk on the Moon. And government programs run a weather satellite system predicting storms. And government programs in the 1930s (CCC) built many of the trails and public amenities we still enjoy today in the USA. And government funded research supports many of the fundamental breakthroughs in science and medicine that we all benefit from. And (for g
As I've suggested before, maybe Linus' profanity is from stress resulting from fundamental monolithic Linux kernel design, where the growing complexity leading to risks of security issues and instability? https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So, sure, one may find specific combinations of infrastructure somewhere. For example: https://sourcingjournal.com/to... ""The next China is not a where, it's a how you do business," he said. "But Africa seems to be the emergence of the next China." Africa today is much like China was in the late 80s and early 90s, McRaith explained. There's little there, but the continent is developing. The first thing to consider, however, McRaith said, is that the sizable continent cannot be discussed as one region and understood as such. Africa is big enough to fit all of the world's major players within it: the United States, China, India, Eastern Europe, Japan, the U.K., Spain, France, Germany and Italy, among others. "Africa is of a scale we've never dealt with," he said."
But it may be harder than you suggest. For your example of Nairobi, consider electrical infrastructure: http://www.afd.fr/en/reliabili... "The poor performance of Kenya's energy sector hampers the country's economic development and poverty reduction strategy: per capita electricity consumption is low, the country suffers relatively frequent power cuts, and small proportion of the population has access to electricity, while the average tariff in the last five years was $0.15 per kilowatt hour, one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa."
And: https://medium.com/@kyleschutt... "You will be robbed in Nairobi, inevitably. No one really talks about it because it is a bit awkward, but it should be discussed. You should know what to do. Except for my sister, everyone I know in Nairobi has been robbed, especially if they own a business. After all, the city's nickname is Nairobbery...."
And: https://travel.state.gov/conte... "Terrorist threats remain in Kenya, including those aimed at U.S., Western, and Kenyan interests, within the Nairobi area, along the coast, and within the northeastern region of the country. Terrorist attacks have cumulatively resulted in the death and injury of hundreds of people since 2011. Over the last year, most incidents have occurred in the northeastern border region of the country; there have been no major attacks in Nairobi, Mombasa, or other major cities in the last two years.... CRIME: Crime in Kenya is a regular occurrence and Kenyan authorities have limited capacity to deter and investigate such acts. Violent and sometimes fatal criminal attacks, including home invasions, burglaries, armed carjackings, muggings, and kidnappings can occur at any time...."
Can large businesses set up generators (or locate near cheap hydropower perhaps), hire private security (ignoring some of those thefts mentioned were inside jobs), build gated compounds for executives and their families, and so on? Of course, but it all adds to the costs and risks of doing business.
Work ethic is a complex topic -- and note I said "hierarchical" work ethic, meaning people's willingness to submit to a big corporation versus their desire to work for themselves and/or their family, village, or tribe. One study from 2011 comparing Chinese and South African work ethic: https://www.emeraldinsight.com... "South Africa is a developing country, and within this context, it is essential to be economically competitive and proactive. Various sources reveal that the national productivity has been traditionally low, and continues to remain low. Within the context of the international arena, this is unacceptable. If South Africa is to become a recognised role player in the internationa
Using LinkedIn and Facebook may be perceived these says as a practical necessity for many people, of course. There is such a thing as social networking effects. But using them is still overall a bad thing for society -- even ignoring the personal mental health effects: https://www.medicaldaily.com/s...
Essentially, profiling (or ratting on) your colleagues and friends/family and defining all your relationships to them to a central authority on an ongoing basis is in some sense immoral in a democracy when other decentralized alternatives exist (e.g. email, IRC, personal websites,and more). It is immoral because it pushes too much power (as information) into a few centers instead of keeping that power decentralized across society. It does not matter if those centers are industrial or governmental.
Giving up such information voluntarily to big central authorities is the kind of thing that anyone who went to public school in the 1960s or 1970s would have been taught reflected the values of Soviet Russia and its pervasive intelligence apparatus (e.g. listening in on all phone calls) -- not the values of a democratic USA.
As Mark Zuckerberg himself said, it is just dumb: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/... Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks
Of course, given such a high level of informational immorality over the past decade (trading privacy for convenience), the world indeed may have changed. It is possible there is no going back -- even as various people, myself included, have worked towards more decentralized communication alternatives.
Of course, there is likely a healthy balance of meshwork and hierarchy needed, so not all one or the other: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me... "Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
No easy answers... But a big potential problem...
See also for the past: https://ibmandtheholocaust.com... "IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing throughout World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s."
And for the present and near future, China's Social Credit system: https://www.theguardian.com/wo... "Chinaâ(TM)s social credit system, a big-data system for monitoring and shaping business and citizensâ(TM) behaviour, is reaching beyond Chinaâ(TM)s borders to impact foreign companies, according to new research. The system, which has been compared to an Orwellian tool of mass surveillance, is an ambitious work in progress: a series of big data and AI-enabled processes that effectively grant subjects a social credit score based on their socia
To begin with, since African labor is currently cheaper than Chinese labor and has been for decades, why aren't all iPhones made in Africa?
Consider: * it's not just cost of labor but also quality of output by labor (related to training and life experience) * the need for surrounding physical infrastructure (like reliable electricity) * the need for surrounding social infrastructure (like a hierarchical work ethic) * the need for surrounding political infrastructure (like rule of law and low corruption) * the cost of transportation (including local transportation to and from ports) * the cost of language barriers * the cost of cultural barriers
Ultimately, to understand why the premise is wrong of all labor being done in Africa instead of by robots, ask yourself, why do you have a local printer or local copier in your home and office when it would be much cheaper per page to have everything printed and copied in a central print shop ten miles away? The answer is that the cost per page is not as significant to you as other values like convenience, turnaround, transportation, privacy, and security.
Most humans in any location are less and less employable relative to robots and AI because human output is of more variable quality, humans take breaks, humans don't work 24X7, humans get sick, humans file lawsuits about working conditions, humans steal things, and humans require safer climate-controlled workplaces. Those are some of the same reasons almost everyone now drives horseless carriages instead of keeping several horses in a barn.
Humans still have some advantages relative to robots and AI in some situations -- e.g. why Telsa should have set up a human-powered assembly line first and then automated when most of the routine needs were clearer. Long term though AI and robots will outperform human labor in almost all situations. Thus the need for a basic income, a gift economy, improved subsistence production with 3D printers and gardening robots, and/or democratically-planned government projects.
In other older societies (especially hunter/gatherers), raising children is more a responsibility of the extended family, village, and tribe. Expectations for what people need to provide a child also differ. Also, increasingly workers in US society don't get a fair share of their contribution to production (compared to other societies). So, this notion of "cant afford children" is culturally relative.
See also the book "Our Babies, Ourselves" by an anthropologist.
One of the things Matthew Walker says in his book on sleep is that sleep-deprived people have poor judgement about the effects of not enough sleep on their cognition.
If Musk has paid attention to that tweet I sent and got more sleep, might he have not have made the subsequent tweet about taking Tesla private which not was him under SEC investigation and facing multiple shareholder lawsuits?
Slashdot Mirror
Something I first wrote in 2001: https://pdfernhout.net/open-le... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
So, CMU has been creating an artificial scarcity of the fruits of $100 million dollars in charitable donations in hopes they could make money for themselves out charging people for access to what they build with those charitable dollars. Of course we should be happy CMU has apparently now seen the error of their ways. But doesn't anyone else here see both the foolishness of the donors (including the government) to give money under such terms (see for example the "Bayh-Dole Act") and the previous immorality of CMU (and most other research universities)?
Whatever one thinks of the law, it is good to understand how the European Parliament is promoting it, as at that link: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
This is not in any way to defend that law, just to say it is useful to try to understand the mindset and world view behind it -- and how it was spun and sold.
While I agree a tax to link to something risks breaking the web (or at least the European part), here are some positive spins from the article about other aspects of copyright reform in the EU probably used to help sell the rest of the restrictions that otherwise seem to favor big publishers: "Uploading protected works for quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody or pastiche has been protected even more than it was before... It also stipulates that copyright restrictions will not apply to content used for teaching or illustration. Finally, the directive also allows copyrighted material to be used free-of-charge to preserve cultural heritage. Out-of-commerce works can be used where no collective management organisation exists that can issue a license."
Of course, what those sentences really mean in practice however they may seem to sound, I don't know.
https://www.goodreads.com/book...
"The first sleep book by a leading scientific expertâ"Professor Matthew Walker, Director of UC Berkeleyâ(TM)s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab -- reveals his groundbreaking exploration of sleep, explaining how we can harness its transformative power to change our lives for the better.
Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when we don't sleep. Compared to the other basic drives in life -- eating, drinking, and reproducing -- the purpose of sleep remained elusive.
An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity.
Walker answers important questions about sleep: how do caffeine and alcohol affect sleep? What really happens during REM sleep? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? How do common sleep aids affect us and can they do long-term damage? Charting cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and synthesizing decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood, and energy levels; regulate hormones; prevent cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes; slow the effects of aging; increase longevity; enhance the education and lifespan of our children, and boost the efficiency, success, and productivity of our businesses. Clear-eyed, fascinating, and accessible, Why We Sleep is a crucial and illuminating book."
See also: "Lecture entitled "Why We Sleep" by Professor Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Maybe we should mandate all of these things too? Because there are hundreds of communicable diseases that all those protect people against -- not just measles.
https://www.drfuhrman.com/shop...
"In Disease-Proof Your Child, Dr. Fuhrman details how a Nutritarian [vegetable-emphasizing etc.] diet increases a child's resistance to common childhood illnesses like asthma, ear infections, and allergies. He explains how eating a high-nutrient diet during childhood protects against developing chronic illness including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and autoimmune disorders."
https://www.everydayfamily.com...
"What all of this means, unfortunately, is that while breastfeeding generally provides the most protection against measles for babies when they are newborns and up to six months, those antibodies wane as they baby gets older. Currently, the CDC doesn't recommend that infants get the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine until they are 12 months old, so babies who are my daughter's age â" 6 months â" are lacking in that protection."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
"It is now clear that vitamin D has important roles in addition to its classic effects on calcium and bone homeostasis. As the vitamin D receptor is expressed on immune cells (B cells, T cells and antigen presenting cells) and these immunologic cells are all are capable of synthesizing the active vitamin D metabolite, vitamin D has the capability of acting in an autocrine manner in a local immunologic milieu. Vitamin D can modulate the innate and adaptive immune responses. Deficiency in vitamin D is associated with increased autoimmunity as well as an increased susceptibility to infection. As immune cells in autoimmune diseases are responsive to the ameliorative effects of vitamin D, the beneficial effects of supplementing vitamin D deficient individuals with autoimmune disease may extend beyond the effects on bone and calcium homeostasis."
https://www.health.harvard.edu... ..."
"Just like a healthy diet, exercise can contribute to general good health and therefore to a healthy immune system. It may contribute even more directly by promoting good circulation, which allows the cells and substances of the immune system to move through the body freely and do their job efficiently.
Adequate sleep is also important for immune function:
https://valleysleepcenter.com/...
"One reason our immune system function is so closely tied to our sleep is that certain disease-fighting substances are released or created while we sleep. Our bodies need these hormones, proteins, and chemicals in order to fight off disease and infection. Sleep deprivation, therefore, decreases the availability of these substances leaving us more susceptible to each new virus and bacteria we encounter. This can also cause us to being sick for a longer period of time as our bodies lack the resources to properly fight whatever it is that is making us sick."
If the logic of forced vaccination holds up, shouldn't we also be putting people in jail for giving children junk food -- as well as for producing or selling junk food consumed by children?
Or maybe we should jail people who are not getting enough sleep (e.g. people who stay up late reading Slashdot) and so are posing a health risk to everyone?
Or is that too slippery a slope for people here to consider?
Humor also boost the immune system. So maybe people who don't laugh enough should also be sent to jail as a health risk? :-)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.ni
I recently learned a friend from college (probably) committed suicide several years ago, and like you I have spent a lot of time thinking about what were the causes and how it could have been prevented.
On prevention, see my previous post which cites this book by David Conroy and related website:
https://www.amazon.com/Out-Nig...
https://www.metanoia.org/suici...
The key idea is to destigmatize asking for help due to suicidal thoughts by having our society view suicide as an *involuntary* act that occurs when pain exceeds coping resources. Anything that can reduce pain (including physical pain, but also social or emotional pain) or increase coping resources (such as emphatic listening) helps prevent suicide. Unfortunately, when suicide is seen in some other ways more common in our culture, the end result is often that more pain just tends to be heaped on existing pain when people reach out for help (so many people learn to avoid asking for help related to suicidal thoughts). So, David Conroy's reconceptualization makes sense to help caring individuals and organizations to think of ways to reduce pain and increase coping resources through daily activities for everyone and not mainly as some last ditch "suicide prevention" intervention.
David Conroy does make the point that limiting access to means or information is to an extent a "coping resource" so I doubt he would be against the Instagram move or cracking down on the groups you mention where people egg each other on.
But ultimately, progress is going to be best made by making people's lives happier and less painful day-to-day, and giving people a true sense that other people and society have their backs and want to help them. However, that is a much larger project than a few crackdowns like with Instagram.
On obtaining a better understanding of suicide, the below is from a book review I put here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
====
Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
by David Conroy
https://www.amazon.com/Out-Nig...
"Out of the Nightmare. An all-out assault on the barriers that stand between you and recovery from depression and suicidal pain. decomposes recovery from depression into recovery from envy, shame, self-pity, grandiosity, fear, stigma, social abuse, and the double binds and vicious circles of the mythology of suicide. A drug-free approach to getting better and staying better. This book provides counselors with a bold new non-technical framework that is free from the prejudices that deter the suicidal from seeking help. It provides those who have lost a loved one to suicide with a broad array of new conceptual tools to understand the tragedy and to find help for stuck positions of bereavement. Most importantly, it provides all those who suffer from depression with hundreds of resources to find their way out of the nightmare."
A suicide by an employee or within the families of employees touches many lives and can significantly impact productivity. Along with advice for suicidal individuals, the book includes suggestion for first responders, counselors, friends, and those who sadly are survivors of someone else's suicide. A major focus of the book includes deconstructing harmful ideas surrounding how people often think about or respond to those who have suicidal ideation and suggesting a more effective way of thinking about suicide prevention called the aggregate pain model.
Some key ideas from the book are summarized here:
https://www.metanoia.org/suici...
"Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. That's all it's about. You are not a bad person, or crazy, or weak, or flawed, because you feel suicidal. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die - it only means that you have more pain than you can cope with right now. If I start piling weights on your shoulders, you will eventually collapse if I add enough weights... no matter how much you want to remain standing. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Of course you would cheer yourself up, if you could. Don't accept it if someone tells you, "That's not enough to be suicidal about." There are many kinds of pain that may lead to suicide. Whether or not the pain is bearable may differ from person to person. What might be bearable to someone else, may not be bearable to you. The point at which the pain becomes unbearable depends on what kinds of coping resources you have. Individuals vary greatly in their capacity to withstand pain. When pain exceeds pain-coping resources, suicidal feelings are the result. Suicide is neither wrong nor right; it is not a defect of character; it is morally neutral. It is simply an imbalance of pain versus coping resources. You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible."
One of the fundamental challenges in an organization or society is to destigmatize asking for help to avoid the classic dillema those with suicidal thoughts face when they expect asking for help will only increase their pain from whatever reactions occur -- such as job loss or being ejected from a university community. By reconceptualizing suicide as an involuntary action that occurs when total pain exceeds resources for coping with pain, David Conroy provides a morally neutral way for organizations and society to think about suicide prevention in a productive way. Rather than focus mainly on intervening in a crisis, organizations can rethink their operations to reduce participant
In a post-scarcity world full of abundance of most basics and no big need to work if you don't want to (like with a basic income or a gift economy or 3D printers and personal robots), why do some unaesthetic and likely unpleasant thing to your brain like stick some hackable chip in it? Why not accept some reasonable limitations put in place by millions of years of evolution about how to have a stable mind and brain? Musk is missing the bigger post-scarcity picture here -- as are most technologists.
A different world view is possible:
https://www.pdfernhout.net/pos...
To give all your work history and work contact info to one centralized repository who can data mine everything about a society in a privileged way just seems like a huge social risk for our society -- the major reason I never joined it.
Something I wrote when Slashdot was a shiny new thing: https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
"executive summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Longer version: https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
For good or bad, in the USA we live in a capitalist society with a (somewhat) free market. We can try to make the most of that because -- given appropriate regulation by the State and a fair distribution of purchasing power -- markets can work. See: ..."
"Planning Through the Market: More Equality Through the Market System" by G. William Domhoff
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.e...
"Most importantly for our purposes, markets can be reconstructed to make it possible to plan for a more egalitarian economic future. It turns out it is possible for strong governments to use the market system for planning. Once it is realized that markets can be viewed from a governmental point of view as administrative instruments for planning, it can be seen that with a little reconfiguring they can serve collective purposes as well as the individual consumer preferences trumpeted by conservative free market economists. In this form of planning, the information is supplied by the price system that is so central to the considerable, but far from perfect, efficiency brought about by markets. There is thus no need for one big planning apparatus. Instead, the planning tools within a reconstructed market system are simply taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation. This point may seem very mundane, but these well-known government powers can be potent when applied to markets.
Just like there are some good cars out there out there (e.g. Toyota Camry) and bad cars (e.g. Ford Pinto), there are some good private schools out there which can be beneficial to specific families with specific needs and interests and there are also some bad private schools. Even the same school can be good or bad for a family depending on circumstances. For example for an overall good school (especially for families with kids who are a little extroverted), consider the Albany Free School:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For parents who don't want to home educate (or otherwise can't do it for some reason), they could spend the $20k per child per year on private school instead. There would thus be a lot of money around to support alternative local private schools (like Montessori schools and child-directed Free schools as well as other types of schools). These schools would have to be very responsive to the needs of families in order to prosper given the potential for competition with all these other educational approaches and other private schools.
People choosing what they want to learn (and spending money on those choices) seems more compatible with a supposedly free-market capitalist society like the USA -- compared to what we have now with most young people being turned into standardized minds in government-owned "education" factories called schools (see my other comment on Prussian-inspired schools).
Local libraries might also be big beneficiaries from this shift. As John Taylor Gatto writes in "The Underground History of American Education", the "public" in public libraries means something very different than the "public" in public schools. Public libraries are inclusive institutions where you pick what you want to learn about on your own schedule and the librarian is not looking over your shoulder at everything you read. By contrast, public schools are only available to some people in the community (and exclude participation to everyone else) and, if you can enroll in them, are essentially mini surveillance states dictating what you learn and when you learn it (regardless of your individual needs or interests).
I's actually prefer a universal basic income over money spent just on families with children. But both of those solutions are in part about the same thing -- addressing a growing destructive rich-poor divide. Both capitalism and democracy can only function well when wealth is roughly evenly distributed across the society. Otherwise regulatory capture and
Some people of all backgrounds do bad things. Someone growing up badly is more likely to happen when parents and the community do not have enough resources to make time for kids and for each other -- since "it takes a village to raise a child well". So, making more money available to people outside of formal schooling seems (to me) to overall be likely to lead to a reduction in violence and other bad behavior across the board -- including by reducing stress levels. (A universal basic income would be another way to address this.)
The mostly forgotten purpose of Prussian-inspired schooling in according to Gatto is to turn children into obedient cannon fodder for a military empire. That includes increasing class and race prejudice in structural ways (e.g. the medium is the message, regardless of the content). Give public schools more money and they will only do that distasteful task even better.
So, without public schools derived from Prussian militaristic ambitions, would the USA overall -- including wars -- be a less violent nation?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Prussian education system refers to the system of education established in Prussia as a result of educational reforms in the late 18th and early 19th century, which has had widespread influence since. It is predominantly used as an American political slogan in educational reform debates, since it was adopted by all American K-12 public schools and major universities as early as the late 18th century, and is often used as a derogatory term for education in the service of nation-building, teaching children and young adults blind obedience to authority, and reinforcing class and race prejudice. The actual Prussian education system was introduced as a basic concept in the late 18th century and was significantly enhanced after Prussia's defeat in the early stages of the Napoleonic Wars. The Prussian educational reforms inspired other countries and remains important as a biopower in the Foucaultian sense for nation-building. Compulsory education on the Prussian example was soon mirrored in Scandinavia, and United States started to adopt the Prussian example."
And in general, by John Taylor Gatto: https://archive.org/details/Th...
"John Taylor Gatto is a former New York public schoolteacher who taught for thirty years and won multiple awards for his teaching. However, constant harassment by unhelpful administrations plus his own frustrations with what he came to realize were the inherent systemic deficiencies of our `public' schools led him to resign; he now is a school-choice activist who writes and speaks against our compulsory, government-run school system.
THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is a freewheeling investigation into the real - as opposed to the `official' - history of schooling, focused on the U.S. but with examinations of other historical examples for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, as well as for tracing where ideas and concepts related to education originated. You will discover things you were never told in the official version, things that will, at times, surprise, disgust, and scare you. You will also be introduced to the little-known historiography of the the darker side of the construction of compulsory government schooling.
In the final analysis, Gatto believes that compulsory, government-run schooling is inherently destructive to true education, the cultivation of self-reliance, and indeed to individualism - which used to be a defining element of the American character. The true purpose of our public school system in reality has more to do with control than it does with learning. This does not mean that rank-and-file teachers, principals, and even superintendents believe they are making students dumber, more conformist, less self-reliant, less capable of genuine analytical, independent thou
According to research cited in Matthew Walker's excellent book, teenagers shift their sleep schedule later by a couple of hours compared to their younger years. This may be because of evolutionary benefits to a tribe of having some people in a village awake to watch for danger when others sleep. A couple of unsupervised hours at night also provides a chance for teenagers to learn to operate independently from their parents while still being part of the family, village, and tribe. So, if you take a teenager who naturally may go to sleep close to midnight and wake up at 10am, and you force them to wake up a 6am to get to a 7am class, you are disrupting their natural sleep cycle which has all kinds of health an cognitive consequences (since naturally they will still stay up late and will thus get less sleep). Examples in the book include a huge reduction in car accidents in an area among teenagers who are better rested. Studies also show vastly better test scores for well-rested teens. Lack of sleep may also be contributing to the teen obesity crisis, the teen heart disease crisis, teen mental illness -- among other negative health impacts from lack of sleep.
More on this: https://www.sleepfoundation.or...
As an additional complexity, some people are naturally "larks" (early morning risers, about 10%, according to link below) and some are naturally "night owls" (later risers, about 20%) while most others are "hummingbirds" in the middle. There is very little that can be done about this since this sleep preference is genetically determined to a significant degree -- although sleep schedule may change as we age as above. Caffeine may help some night owls get going anyway in the morning -- but there remains a significant health impact of getting too sleep -- since most night owls simply are not going to go to bed earlier even if they are forced to wake up earlier.
https://www.nasw.org/users/lla...
People suffer if their sleep schedule does not reflect their natural cycle. So, forcing a night owl to perform early in the morning is just a bad idea -- whatever the person's age. Similarly, the cognitive performance of someone who stays up a few hours late or who gets a few hours too little sleep is typically similar to that of someone who is drunk -- which is why drowsy driving kills more people than drunk driving. If an early morning school schedule is terrible for a regular teenager, it is going to be even worse for a night owl.
If you have three kids, that is $60k a year. That is about the average household income in the USA. And since household income is often unevenly distributed between two working parents, even just $20k a year is about what one parent might be making, say, working at minimum wage at a convenience store (especially if not quite full time). And $20k a year would go a long way for some families otherwise living near the edge of poverty (especially in rural areas where the cost of living is generally lower). For farming families with a couple of kids, this money could mean the difference between a parent needing to work off the farm to bring in income (maybe with a long commute) or not.
There are so many free resources on the internet now (e.g. Khan Academy) that providing learning opportunities to children is much easier than it was decades ago. There's a difference between supervising a child's education and teaching everything yourself.
As more families homeschool, it becomes easier for all of them since there are more near-by families with kids around to interact with and share resources with. Also, with all that money in the hands of families with kids, they can afford things like educational travel, tutors, and learning center classes -- boosting those areas of the economy. And decent public school teacher could probably do as well financially working in those growing areas and would probably be a lot happier teaching only people who actively want to learn in those areas.
So, give the money directly to the parents to choose whatever educational options they think best (including homeschooling and private schools). See my essay on this from about a decade ago: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not."
https://www.pdfernhout.net/tow...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
On why early start times are terrible teenagers:
https://www.theguardian.com/bo...
"The book bears a sobering and vital message, too, about the centrality of sleep to the proper development of young minds. Early school starting times - particularly in the US, where, barbarically, almost half of public high schools start before 7.20am - are disastrous for the mental health of teenagers. There is serious evidence, Walker suggests, for viewing lack of sleep as a factor in the onset of depression and schizophrenia."
If Amazon customer service and delivery quality is decreasing over time, wonder if this increasingly applies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is a non-fiction book by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, first published in 2007. It deals with cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and other cognitive biases, using these psychological theories to illustrate how the perpetrators (and victims) of hurtful acts justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes become polarized."
LOL. Her name is Meredith F. Small:
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Bab...
A microkernel like MINIX 3 has about 10,000 lines of code. The Linux Kernel has about 20,000,000 lines of code. If you mainly focus on getting only 10,000 lines right, you will have a lot less stress than trying to herd cats on 20,000x more code.
Ideally, for a core kernel maintainer, drivers should be mainly someone else's responsibility (with a separate vetting process) and should be firewalled from any service they don't absolutely need access to. A monolithic kernel just provides too much surface area for mischief to hide (whether intentional or unintentional).
See the list of "reliability policies" here for MINIX (I just included the titles of each section): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
* Reduce kernel size
* Cage the bugs
* Limit drivers' memory access
* Survive bad pointers
* Tame infinite loops
* Limit damage from buffer overflows
* Restrict access to kernel functions
* Restrict access to I/O ports
* Restrict communication with OS components
* Reincarnate dead or sick drivers
* Integrate interrupts and messages
Focusing a microkernel on a very small number of core services more closely adheres to Single Responsibility Principle compared to the Linux Kernel. That makes the overall kernel simpler to understand even if it may manage many drivers. See:
https://www.infoq.com/presenta...
"Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity's virtues over easiness', showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path."
It is probably harder to write a microkernel line-for-line compared to the same number of generally less sophisticated lines on average in a monolithic kernel -- but overall the system is much simpler and thus more reliable because the focused microkernel is easier to audit and test separate from all the drivers.
My suggestion is that if Linus Torvalds was focused primarily on the code quality of 10,000 lines of microkernel code he would be less stressed than worrying about the quality of 20,000x as much monolithic kernel code where any badness in those 20,000,000 lines of Linux kernel code could (if you load the driver) infect the whole. Even if Linus still used the same amount of profanity per line of hypothetical Linux microkernel code, his profanity level would still be reduced 10,000x and so essentially round to zero! :-)
A Slashdot story from 2000 on this idea:
"Could Linux Become A Microkernel?"
https://ask.slashdot.org/story...
Thanks for your comment, and while those are all good points, I feel they a missing the forest for the trees.
While you are right for one type of gift economy, there are at least two types of gift economy. The first is as you outlined about maintaining social status in a social network (like for some Native American tribes that used the Potlatch ceremony). But there is also another form (or aspect) of gift economy based around volunteering semi-anonymously to give back to the larger community -- like with all the people contributing comments to Slashdot for free, people who work on Wikipedia (for all its flaws), people who write FOSS, and so on. Certainly there can be mixes of the two motivations, so a complex topic. There are poor people now in an exchange-dominant economy and there might be status poor people in a gift economy (even if they get enough to eat).
You use the word "we" in your defense of the exchange economy. And I agree exchange transactions can have various benefits for specific individuals and so indirectly to societies. But the reason to soften the harshness of the exchange economy and all its contracts and so on is precisely because there is no "we" in it. Exchange is about individuals (or organizations) making contracts with each other -- usually ignoring externalities to other individuals (e.g. pollution, meltdown risk, market failure) or leaving many people out of the benefits (unless the government steps in with regulations and taxes and such). With a growing concentration of wealth and a growing rich/poor divide, and also with vast amounts of taxes going towards militarism to protect specific commercial interests (e.g. "War is a Racket"), "we" is a more and more problematical term to use in describing the benefits of a capitalist society. Thus ideas like "Social Credit" by C. H Douglas to overlay the exchange economy with a basic income:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel"."
Most 3D printers are fairly limited today. We are still far away from Star Trek replicators. That said, they are getting better every year. And a big advantage of 3D printers, especially ones that print in metal or other durable materials, is that you no longer have to keep an inventory of mass-produced parts around "just in case". You can also make more efficient designs in terms of mass usage when multiple types of parts can be printed together in custom ways. Combine 3D printers with robots and CNC machine and mini forgers and so on in a small shop, and there is a lot of potential for people being able to opt out of a lot of exchange transactions (if maybe not all). Likewise, local knowledge and better sensors make it possible for people to avoid doctors and dentists to some degree (including by eating better or avoiding stresses and exercising more and getting more sleep so on) -- so another way or reducing the need for exchange by subsistence.
Yes there is the bike shed affect for planning in any organization, where less knowledgeable people focus on less important details while glossing over stuff that matters a lot more. But government programs still made it possible for Neil Armstrong to walk on the Moon. And government programs run a weather satellite system predicting storms. And government programs in the 1930s (CCC) built many of the trails and public amenities we still enjoy today in the USA. And government funded research supports many of the fundamental breakthroughs in science and medicine that we all benefit from. And (for g
As I've suggested before, maybe Linus' profanity is from stress resulting from fundamental monolithic Linux kernel design, where the growing complexity leading to risks of security issues and instability?
https://slashdot.org/comments....
https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So, sure, one may find specific combinations of infrastructure somewhere. For example:
https://sourcingjournal.com/to...
""The next China is not a where, it's a how you do business," he said. "But Africa seems to be the emergence of the next China." Africa today is much like China was in the late 80s and early 90s, McRaith explained. There's little there, but the continent is developing. The first thing to consider, however, McRaith said, is that the sizable continent cannot be discussed as one region and understood as such. Africa is big enough to fit all of the world's major players within it: the United States, China, India, Eastern Europe, Japan, the U.K., Spain, France, Germany and Italy, among others. "Africa is of a scale we've never dealt with," he said."
But it may be harder than you suggest. For your example of Nairobi, consider electrical infrastructure:
http://www.afd.fr/en/reliabili...
"The poor performance of Kenya's energy sector hampers the country's economic development and poverty reduction strategy: per capita electricity consumption is low, the country suffers relatively frequent power cuts, and small proportion of the population has access to electricity, while the average tariff in the last five years was $0.15 per kilowatt hour, one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa."
And: ..."
https://medium.com/@kyleschutt...
"You will be robbed in Nairobi, inevitably. No one really talks about it because it is a bit awkward, but it should be discussed. You should know what to do. Except for my sister, everyone I know in Nairobi has been robbed, especially if they own a business. After all, the city's nickname is Nairobbery.
And: ... ..."
https://travel.state.gov/conte...
"Terrorist threats remain in Kenya, including those aimed at U.S., Western, and Kenyan interests, within the Nairobi area, along the coast, and within the northeastern region of the country. Terrorist attacks have cumulatively resulted in the death and injury of hundreds of people since 2011. Over the last year, most incidents have occurred in the northeastern border region of the country; there have been no major attacks in Nairobi, Mombasa, or other major cities in the last two years.
CRIME: Crime in Kenya is a regular occurrence and Kenyan authorities have limited capacity to deter and investigate such acts. Violent and sometimes fatal criminal attacks, including home invasions, burglaries, armed carjackings, muggings, and kidnappings can occur at any time.
Can large businesses set up generators (or locate near cheap hydropower perhaps), hire private security (ignoring some of those thefts mentioned were inside jobs), build gated compounds for executives and their families, and so on? Of course, but it all adds to the costs and risks of doing business.
Work ethic is a complex topic -- and note I said "hierarchical" work ethic, meaning people's willingness to submit to a big corporation versus their desire to work for themselves and/or their family, village, or tribe. One study from 2011 comparing Chinese and South African work ethic:
https://www.emeraldinsight.com...
"South Africa is a developing country, and within this context, it is essential to be economically competitive and proactive. Various sources reveal that the national productivity has been traditionally low, and continues to remain low. Within the context of the international arena, this is unacceptable. If South Africa is to become a recognised role player in the internationa
Using LinkedIn and Facebook may be perceived these says as a practical necessity for many people, of course. There is such a thing as social networking effects. But using them is still overall a bad thing for society -- even ignoring the personal mental health effects: https://www.medicaldaily.com/s...
Essentially, profiling (or ratting on) your colleagues and friends/family and defining all your relationships to them to a central authority on an ongoing basis is in some sense immoral in a democracy when other decentralized alternatives exist (e.g. email, IRC, personal websites,and more). It is immoral because it pushes too much power (as information) into a few centers instead of keeping that power decentralized across society. It does not matter if those centers are industrial or governmental.
Giving up such information voluntarily to big central authorities is the kind of thing that anyone who went to public school in the 1960s or 1970s would have been taught reflected the values of Soviet Russia and its pervasive intelligence apparatus (e.g. listening in on all phone calls) -- not the values of a democratic USA.
As Mark Zuckerberg himself said, it is just dumb:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
Of course, given such a high level of informational immorality over the past decade (trading privacy for convenience), the world indeed may have changed. It is possible there is no going back -- even as various people, myself included, have worked towards more decentralized communication alternatives.
Instead, we may have to consider, say, David Brin's "Transparent Society" as a different option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course, there is likely a healthy balance of meshwork and hierarchy needed, so not all one or the other:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
No easy answers... But a big potential problem...
See also for the past:
https://ibmandtheholocaust.com...
"IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing throughout World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s."
And for the present and near future, China's Social Credit system:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
"Chinaâ(TM)s social credit system, a big-data system for monitoring and shaping business and citizensâ(TM) behaviour, is reaching beyond Chinaâ(TM)s borders to impact foreign companies, according to new research. The system, which has been compared to an Orwellian tool of mass surveillance, is an ambitious work in progress: a series of big data and AI-enabled processes that effectively grant subjects a social credit score based on their socia
To begin with, since African labor is currently cheaper than Chinese labor and has been for decades, why aren't all iPhones made in Africa?
Consider:
* it's not just cost of labor but also quality of output by labor (related to training and life experience)
* the need for surrounding physical infrastructure (like reliable electricity)
* the need for surrounding social infrastructure (like a hierarchical work ethic)
* the need for surrounding political infrastructure (like rule of law and low corruption)
* the cost of transportation (including local transportation to and from ports)
* the cost of language barriers
* the cost of cultural barriers
Ultimately, to understand why the premise is wrong of all labor being done in Africa instead of by robots, ask yourself, why do you have a local printer or local copier in your home and office when it would be much cheaper per page to have everything printed and copied in a central print shop ten miles away? The answer is that the cost per page is not as significant to you as other values like convenience, turnaround, transportation, privacy, and security.
Most humans in any location are less and less employable relative to robots and AI because human output is of more variable quality, humans take breaks, humans don't work 24X7, humans get sick, humans file lawsuits about working conditions, humans steal things, and humans require safer climate-controlled workplaces. Those are some of the same reasons almost everyone now drives horseless carriages instead of keeping several horses in a barn.
Humans still have some advantages relative to robots and AI in some situations -- e.g. why Telsa should have set up a human-powered assembly line first and then automated when most of the routine needs were clearer. Long term though AI and robots will outperform human labor in almost all situations. Thus the need for a basic income, a gift economy, improved subsistence production with 3D printers and gardening robots, and/or democratically-planned government projects.
See also: "Humans Need Not Apply"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In other older societies (especially hunter/gatherers), raising children is more a responsibility of the extended family, village, and tribe. Expectations for what people need to provide a child also differ. Also, increasingly workers in US society don't get a fair share of their contribution to production (compared to other societies). So, this notion of "cant afford children" is culturally relative.
See also the book "Our Babies, Ourselves" by an anthropologist.
Thanks for the informative post!
on Friday August 17th, 2018: https://twitter.com/ariannahuf...
https://www.thriveglobal.com/s...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
And sadly Musk rejected that advice:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/s...
One of the things Matthew Walker says in his book on sleep is that sleep-deprived people have poor judgement about the effects of not enough sleep on their cognition.
If Musk has paid attention to that tweet I sent and got more sleep, might he have not have made the subsequent tweet about taking Tesla private which not was him under SEC investigation and facing multiple shareholder lawsuits?