A mainstream academic economics department is in some ways essentially a modern theocracy.

The book "Disciplined Minds" helps explain the social dynamic behind that (which applies to some extent in most graduate programs, but may be most extreme in some like economics these days):
    http://disciplinedminds.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
    In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
    The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
    Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Supporting examples include "The Market as God": http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
    Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of deja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies. ..."

And "The Mythology of Wealth": http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"Justifications for elites and social hierarchy goes all the way back to the pharaohs. For 6000 years, society has organized itself into social classes. The people who do the work are always in the lower classes. The harder and nastier the work, the lower down in the social order you sink. The people who don't do this work must justify their position. They do it by establishing their "worthiness", and a variety of cultural devices have been concocted over the millennia to accomplish this. The pharaohs, you may recall, weren't people at all. They were gods. Roman emperors likewise had themselves deified, and before that Roman Senators justified their position as "patricians". Basically, "my great great granddaddy was a big shot, therefore I should be too."
    The middle ages gave us the notion of the "great chain of being". Outside the earthly realm - in the realm of myth , that is - there is Jesus and the "heavenly host". Just below the angels and saints is the king, followed by his entourage of muscle men otherwise known as the "nobility". Since kings were chosen "by the grace of God", they didn't answer to ordinary mortals. At least they didn't before Runnymeade, when the English nobility straightened out King John about where his power really came from.
    This is the historical background for those famous words of Thomas Jefferson. "Governments are instituted among men, and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed". Everyone has heard those words. School children recite them. Few people appreciate that those words repudiated 6000 years of mumbo-jumbo to justify the existence of social classes and fixed elites. Elites don't get their power from the gods, or from Jesus or from any other mythological source. Elites get their power from the people they rule. Power flows from the bottom up, not from the top down.
    Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a "leisure class". As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies - gods, the "great chain of being" etc. - are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new "rational" world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites.
    That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology. ..."

And a plea by some academics struggling against this economic theocracy:
http://www.responsiblefinance....
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."

By more economics students:
http://www.isipe.net/open-lett...
http://www.universityworldnews...
"It is not only the world economy that is in crisis. The teaching of economics is in crisis too, and this crisis has consequences far beyond the university walls. What is taught shapes the minds of the next generation of policymakers, and therefore shapes the societies we live in. We, over 65 associations of economics students from over 30 different countries, believe it is time to reconsider the way economics is taught. We are dissatisfied with the dramatic narrowing of the curriculum that has taken place over the last couple of decades. This lack of intellectual diversity does not only restrain education and research. It limits our ability to contend with the multidimensional challenges of the 21st century - from financial stability, to food security and climate change. The real world should be brought back into the classroom, as well as debate and a pluralism of theories and methods. Such change will help renew the discipline and ultimately create a space in which solutions to society's problems can be generated."

And:
"They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07...
" But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded." "

"Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal"
http://www.amazon.com/Economic...
"At a time when growing numbers of people are deeply anxious about the workings of our economy--and when our very future as a society is up for grabs--economist Moshe Adler offers a lively and accessible debunking of two elements that make economics the "science" of the rich: the definition of what is efficient and the theory of how wages are determined. Filled with lively examples, from food riots in Indonesia to the eminent domain in Connecticut and everyone from Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham to Larry Summers, here is a bold and important book that offers a foundation for a fundamentally more just economic system."

And also:
"Mainstream economics, heterodoxy and academic exclusion: a review essay"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
"Does the mainstream of economic thinking and analysis tend systematically to exclude ideas and approaches that could enrich the field, and, as a consequence, have important questions and issues been shunted aside for nonobjective reasons? Two recent volumes by heterodox economists that address these questions are Geoffrey Hodgson's How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science, and Steve Keen's Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. I evaluate their claims of academic exclusion and assess the current state of (selective) pluralism within mainstream economics."

Anyway, these are examples of the ideological power creating and sustaining artificial scarcity at this point as a sort of intellectual neo-feudalism. As Bob Black suggests:
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."

A bunch of economic alternatives I've collected:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...

You bring up an important issue. However, in practice, the most common way large numbers of people tent to become underfed, uneducated, and victims of slave culture ideology (religion being complex topic) is from things like colonialism and militarism actively destroying real abundance and healthy cultures in a quest for some dysfunctional imbalance.

For example, consider what happened when Columbus came to the Americas:
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus. ... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.... ... When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island. ..."

Contrast with what Marshall Sahlins said about most hunter/gathers:
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

Also related:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"Peace makes plenty.
Plenty makes pride.
Pride breeds dispute.
Poverty's the fruit.
Poverty makes peace."

But that poem from the 14th century (!) is a very different take on things than saying scarcity or want or ignorance is a natural state of being...

Still, even in such cases as you describe with billions of people under subjugation, people (in aggregate) are always thinking of new ideas about their situation and new ways of doing things, and improving their skills and sharing ideas. It takes a lot to shut that growth process down.

For a current example, consider all the effort of groups like by RIAA and similar groups through political lobbying to create more artificial scarcity (e.g. The Sonny Bono / Micky Mouse copyright extension act). These restrictive efforts now ensure people can in theory do more jail time and get bigger fines for sharing (copyrighted) information like a few inspirational songs than if they had committed murder. See for example:
"Seven Crimes That Will Get You a Smaller Fine than File-Sharing"
http://www.prefixmag.com/news/...

Yet, as Richard Stallman says, sharing is the basis of community and civilization. When I was born, there were essentially no criminal penalties for copyright infringement, only civil ones which required civil lawsuits at the copyright holder's expense. The criminalization of copyright violation and significant police involvement was a big change over the past couple decades. However, people are still responding in various creative ways, with GNU/etc/Linux and Create Commons licensed content and Wikipedia and Slashdot discussions and so on.

Much of early US American prosperity was built on using ideas covered by patents and texts covered by copyrights from Europe without paying any royalties. There was also a great benefit to US American agriculture from the huge agricultural genetic diversity created by immigrants to the USA bringing in all sorts of plants and animals with them.

And of course, countries like China or India essentially ignore many US patents or copyrights. Like is suggested here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Creat...
"Frederick Noronha a journalist in India: "There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?" "

As I say elsewhere, people may consume resources and take up space, but they also produce resources and create spaces worth being in. Likewise, people may spread misinformation, but they can also discover and spread useful information. It takes a lot to keep billions of people down.

See also the 1950s sc-fi story by Theodore Sturgeon "The Skills of Xanadu" for another take on what mobile computing is making possible. It is the story that is part of what inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext (he coined the term in 1963) and the "Xanadu" project, and hypertext underpins the World Wide Web.
https://archive.org/details/pr...

You can download a Palm Beach Hotel and beachfront here: http://www.planetminecraft.com...

Or, if you want something less virtual, consider working towards seasteading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Or large space habitats:
http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov...

And of course, there is also "the Matrix" of "the Holodeck" for immersive reality beyond what Minecraft offers (not there yet, but maybe we are?)

Each of those ideas is a product of the imagination... Even if some have yet to be realized, or may never be.

So, yes, you can have what you want, today, with Minecraft, thanks to a lot of imaginative people (including Inifiniminer by Zachary Barth, a big inspiration behind Minecraft). Should we have declared all those imaginative people surplus at birth out of some fear there was not enough to go around? People may consume resources and they may crowd places, it's true, but people also can create resources and can create places worth being in.

Now, after my having said this, you may put more qualifiers on your request to be contrary perhaps and say a beach front hotel in Minecraft virtual reality is not what you mean. However, then you are not engaging in a playful spirit and you are to some extent creating your own artificial scarcity and artificial unhappiness for yourself compared to a lot of interesting experiences you can have right now. As far as the basics (and including a computer that can run Minecraft and so on) there is plenty to go around on planet Earth for billions of humans. And with a little bit of effort, we could create enough land (and beachfront property) for quadrillions of people. Just like the Dutch created habitable land from the sea, future humans can create habitable land from space resources.

For some inspiration on what might be possible, see Iain Bank's "Culture" novels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Anyway, will there still be conflicts and scarcities, even with abundance? Sure. Humans compete with each other for all sorts of reasons, including for the attention of specific people nearby (and including as part of a mating dance for relative status, see for example James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear"). But by the time we are talking about those sorts of scarcities, we are way beyond the sort of material scarcity most mainstream economics assumes.

BTW, various jobs are listed here at Palm Beach area hotels if you want to be around that physical ambiance right now:
http://www.hotelforcepalmbeach...

After all, how many rooms of a mansion can one person physically occupy at one time? And an empty mansion at night with you as the only occupant can seem kind of creepy and lonely and even boring...

that no one expected: http://www.homestead.afrc.af.m...
"For the individuals laying eyes on the base for the first time since the storm, reconciling what they were seeing seemed impossible.
    "Those things that have been a part of your life for so long, I guess you take for granted that they're always going to be there," said Mr. Tom Miller, currently with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron and during Hurricane Andrew was the electrical shop chief with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron as an Air Reserve Technician. Mr. Miller was living in Cutler Bay at the time of the hurricane and weathered the storm in St. Petersburg. He's been a member of the base since 1968.
    "The most vivid memories I have are when I first went back to where I lived and when I first went back to the base because that was where I lived and worked," he said. "Those are the things that you get some strength from, and then to come back and see that area was completely devastated, that really hits you. The devastation seemed insurmountable." ...
  For those who've seen both the before and after of the storm, 20 years means different things to different people. "Sometimes it feels like it was 200 years ago and then other times it feels like it was last week," said Miller. "When I came back on base after the storm, a place where I had worked for 20 years, I just thought, 'what's the answer for this?'; 'where do we even start?' We learned a big lesson: these things can change people's lives overnight. The base has come back, and I'm glad it did.""

For another example, one week my mother was living in a nice house and was a smiling teenager. The next week, her home town looked like this due to WWII fighting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Or, as Howard Zinn said:
http://www.thenation.com/artic...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
      I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
    There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. ..."

See also my other comment to a different story here on different sorts of existential societal risks and possible solutions: http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Humans these days have been so blessed with so much including a relatively mild climate the past few centuries compared to the past. It is only because of that blessing that our thoughts can focus on internal conflicts of human vs. human instead of the greater eternal conflict of human vs. a capricious environment. We need to invest more in dealing with such environmental existential risks.

It is just foolish, even laughable, that the USA can, say, spend US$1 trillion a year or more on the US military including incurred future costs related to human political conflicts (many of which the USA helped create) while our infrastructure falls apart and we don't invest in, say, protecting our power grid from solar flares, or that we don't scale our medical systems to deal with possible pandemics, or we don't move to indoor or even underground agriculture faster to get it out of harms way of the weather. On that last:
http://www.ibtimes.com/indoor-...

We can get so wrapped up in our fears about human conflicts we just seem to forget as a nation all the other existential risks out there -- including from "want and ignorance".
http://www.cedmagic.com/featur...
"This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased."

I can wonder if the Homestead AFB Hurricane experience is one reason the US military is so concerned about climate change?
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
"Climate change does not respect borders and we must work together to fight its threats. These are not the words of a tree-hugger, but the US Department of Defense. ..."

We all need some security. The issue is how we go about getting it individually and collectively, as I discuss here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

See: http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

In general, as Julian Simon wrote, the (educated, nourished, healthy) human imagination is the ultimate resource that invents all other resources, so in general the more people you have, the more imagination you have. For example, woudl we have the internet if someone in the 1600s had decided there were too many people because London was overcrowded and killed off all but a million humans on the planet? The solar system can probably support quadrillions of people living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore like JD Bernal imagined in the 1920s.
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

That list is very similar to what I had listed here in back in 1999 (minus a few fanciful ones):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
        Autonomous military robots out of control
        Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
        Ethnically targeted virus
        Sterility virus
        Computer virus
        Asteroid impact
        Y2K
        Other unforseen computer failure mode
        Global warming / climate change / flooding
        Nuclear / biological war
        Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
        Terrorism w/ unforseen wide effects
        Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
        Religious / philosophical warfare
        Economic imbalance leading to world war
        Arms race leading to world war
        Zero-point energy tap out of control
        Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
        Unforseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)"

But in the end, I think the issue raised in my sig is the biggest challenge: the perilous irony of people using the tools of material abundance in a war-like way as if material scarcity was still a major concern, as well as derivative issues like the moral problem of creating artificial scarcity under capitalism and so on. There are possible solutions to such issues (basic income, expanded gift economy, improved subsistence via 3D printing and personal agricultural robots and indoor agriculture and solar panels and so on, participatory democratic planning supported by the internet), but ideology and existing artificial-scarcity-based power structures stands in the way. Still, the dominant ideology is slowly shifting top a more open and abundance-oriented one. As Buckminster Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...

Not sure why it was modded down to zero. Very insightful. For all we know, there are many ancient communities on Earth and elsewhere living that way already. Even though I have written in the past about "refugia" for humans (see my website and grad student plans from the 1980s) I agree that swarms of AI probes could scour Earth (even underground eventually) and most things in space would be visible and approachable (including by high velocity kinetic weapons). So, I've come around to thinking the the best way to have a happy singularity is for humans to get our social house in order before then, because the direction we take coming out of a singularity may have a lot to do with out path into it. Thus I'm for a basic income, an expanded gift economy, increased subsistence, internet-enhanced democratic planning, and so on.

I grew up as a kid watching Sealab 2020 which I loved. Somewhere in the late 1980s I sent a letter to a Navy Admiral about making self-reliant undersea bases, but never heard back. I won a Navy Science Award for a high school robot project and had sent it to the admiral who had signed the letter. An interesting related book about the reality of living underwater (although personally I feel both in the ocean and space humans will just stay in structures or work pods and rarely try to go out in special protective clothing):
http://benhellwarth.com/
"SEALAB is like the underwater Right Stuff: The story of how a gutsy group of U.S. Navy divers and scientists set out to develop the marine equivalent of space stations -- and forever changed manâ(TM)s relationship to the sub-aquatic world. ..."

BTW, on evading "detection" -- there are layers there. If you think about the human immune system, things can be "detected" but they may only be acted on if they seem like a threat (especially given limited resources and multiple real pressing threats including internal issues).

Read the first prologue part of Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon The Deep" for some related thoughts on resisting powerful growing AIs. I quote from that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
""Of course [the humans] suspect. But what can they do? It's an old evil they've awakened. Till it's ready, it will feed them lies, on every camera, in every message from home."
Thought ceased for a moment as a shadow passed across the nodes they used. The overness was already greater than anything human, greater than anything humans could imagine. Even its shadow was something more than human, a god trolling for nuisance wildlife. The the ghosts were back, looking out upon the school yard underground. So confident the humans, a little village they had made there.
"Still," though the hopeful one, the one who had always looked for the craziest outs, "we should not be. The evil should long ago have found us."
"The evil is young, barely three days old."
"Still. We exist. It proves something. The humans found more than a great evil in this archive."
"Perhaps they found *two*."
"Or an antidote." Whatever else, the overness was missing some things, and misinterpreting others. "While we exist, when we exist, we should do what we can." ... "

But perhaps the deepest wrongness these days is what I mention in my sig -- the ironic perils of the tools of abundance (like nuclear energy, AI, robotics, nanotech, biotech, bureaucracy, etc.) in the hands of those still fighting over perceived scarcity). Think of all those Navy subs, powered by relatively clean safe nuclear reactors, ready on political command to use other arrangements of nuclear energy to destroy all of human life as we know it on Planet Earth for petty and short-sighted conflicts over oil profits... It would be hilarious if it was not so deadly serious.

See also my "OSCMOAK: ideas (going back to the 1980s) for a better way -- although the Maker movement is busy working towards surpassing those ideas, although still lacks a common standard for encoding webs of manufacturing information one could use to design resilient sustainable self-replicating infrastructures.

While what you say is indeed true, in practice the farther human behavior changes from what we are adapted for, the more stress people are under and the more likely social systems and/or the people in them will fail. In the case of early development up to age two to four, it seems clear humans are wired for learning from social interactions with caregivers as well as physical hand-eye interactions with the natural environment including rocks, plants, sand, water, and so on. Still, on the plus side, one reason tablets are so successful with young children compared to interfaces that require a mouse or trackpad is that it supports the direct hand-eye manipulation young kids seem wired for.

So, while it is true that me could in theory do better, the human brain being flexible, it is not clear that anything we have done in modern times has overall made the experience of being a young child any better than it was 10,000 years ago (other than perhaps reduced infant mortality). Even the modern diet is mostly destructive to health, although obviously it is generally better than starving to death. Addictions also exploit human adaptations that once made sense (preferring sweet, fat, and salt) where when industrialized foods are engineered to emphasize those things to the exclusion of all else, the end result is people's health suffering even as their body tells them to keep eating junk. I've posted links several times before about books and essay by other people on how to escape the pleasure trap, on supernormal stimuli, and on the acceleration of addictiveness and similar things.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.amazon.com/Supernor...
http://paulgraham.com/addictio...
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-...
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play...

These things could apply to children of any age as well as adults. And likely that includes something TV and various games exploit, which is a "startle reflex" to moving things that forces the human mind to pay immediate attention to them, since in the past humans who did not may have died from a snake bite or tiger or whatever. But now, continually changing TV images can use that reflex to keep us captivated, even while our body or the rest of our lives suffer. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
"In his 2007 book The Assault on Reason, Al Gore posited that watching television has an impact on the orienting response, an effect similar to vicarious traumatization."

As people grow up through their mid-twenties, parts of the brain develop that provide more control for longer term planning, with perhaps some more hope of dealing with the worst of all this. But for young children, they are easy prey to people who would somehow make money of this, whether food scientists or media content providers or tablet software developers. And parents are so overburdened between two full-time wage earners and their own pleasure traps with extended families so broken up that there is little time for parents to deal with all the possible traps for their children. Kids remain resilient, and learn from everything they do, but there are still issues of long-term happiness and the quality of the experience. Or, in other words, manufactured ice cream may seem yummy, but it is ultimately is bad for the health if consumed in mass quantities. And if we spend all our will power resisting the lure of ice cream, then there is little left over to resist other things or do other tasks.

See also stuff on "Ego depletion"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
"Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower draw upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up."

Humor is one thing that can help restore willpower sooner. :-)

Again, in theory we could do much better. In practice, especially in a capitalist system that rewards short-term thinking that privatizes gains and socializes costs, whether we can achieve the promise from that capacity to learn that you mention remains to be seen. I can wonder if, overall, we are indeed losing the battle and "amusing ourselves to death"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control."

BTW, music has been suggested to be a way that humans develop logical reasoning ability as well as social cohesion at an early age in a safe way, learning about patterns of music while the outcome is not that big a deal. Admittedly, some of that is speculative, but see for example:
http://csml.som.ohio-state.edu...

Also, regarding your sig, see also: http://www.disciplined-minds.c...

Still, I hope you are right, and optimism tends to be a good thing, especially compared to disempowering despair! :-)
http://www.thenation.com/artic...
http://www.activehope.info/

As I see it, given the universe is probably a simulation (Edward Fredkin talks about this, among others), the issue is not where energy comes from, where the computational matrix came from. This assumes that is indeed a valid question, since philosophically the nature of consciousness may just assume computation or somehow be one with it.

To understand my point, consider if you were to make a simulation of the Milky Way Galaxy colliding with Andromeda, like in this cool video:
"GTC2012 Kepler GPU Demo: When Galaxies Collide "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"In this video, Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang and Stephen Jones demonstrate the power of the new Kepler GPU. This astronomy simulation shows that the Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy in 4-5 Billion years from now."

When writing the code, you would realize that the total amount of energy you put in the simulation is essentially arbitrary. You can set the kinetic energy of motion of all the individual simulated bits to whatever you wanted (up to the limits of how you store the numbers by flipping bits in silicon). The potential energy of gravitation or electromagnetism you create in the simulation is likewise essentially arbitrary, based on how you place the initial components and how you set gravitational constants and electromagnetic constants. Granted, there are consequences to how you set all those parameters, but that is a different design constraint based on aesthetics or purpose.

So, from my viewpoint, it is quite possible that "energy" and "matter" are probably essentially arbitrary. Someone with control over low-level aspects of the simulation (maybe even humans, someday) could magic matter and energy into existence as easily as a banking computer could magic trillions of dollars into existence by flipping a few bits on a hard drive or computer memory or fiber optic messages somewhere. Granted, there are social consequences to such currency creations, and likely would also be some social consequences somewhere as well to magicking matter and energy. :-)

But, that still leaves the question of where the computational matrix came from. Or, as is mentioned here, what implements the virtual turtles all the way down. :-)
http://science.slashdot.org/co...
https://mail.python.org/piperm...

Still, as another Slashdot story or poster months or years ago said, there is a some finite probability infinity will create itself from absolute nothingness, given the lack of constraints in complete nothingness. So, that could explain it all in that sense. :-)

Granted, my comments and musings on all this is perhaps just like a bacterium trying to make sense of what is happening while it is on the wing of a jetliner -- or no doubt the situation is even stranger. So, just some thoughts and possibilities. And of course, as other posters have said, or Iain Banks in "Excession", this is an "Out-of-context problem" which can not be that well addressed by typical scientific paradigms or rules of inquiry, since we are talking about things beyond the tiny circle of light cast by the comparatively feeble flickering of human mind and society, relative to a vast infinity of infinities and so on.

Still, we don't fully understand the human mind or consciousness either, so who really knows what it is possible to understand or not understand. We don't even know how long "humans" in a sense "live", with life after life as a possibility (like if "life is but a dream" or a game or learning experience we will wake up from and go onto other experiences), and so on.

Again, these all quickly become religious and philosophical questions -- but that does not mean they are not important or interesting. Although it does mean they are not that open to conventional "scientific" exploration of repeatable experiments (or, of course, funded explorations from "scientific" organizations :-). Still, for centuries the Roman Catholic Church (as one example among many) in a sense underwrote such explorations in terms of supporting theologians and priests and monks and nuns and so on (as well as much other things of even more controversy). And it still does to some extent. And flickers of such inquiry can show up anywhere now and then, even places like Slashdot when it is not in an offline mood. :-)

(I wanted to reply to this when you first posted, but Slashdot was in one of its increasingly often offline moods... Just getting back to it now.)

I agree, although it remains painful economically as pointed out by another commented in reply. My wife and I put more than size person years into making a free (GPL) garden simulator and related web site in the 1990s, and while we did not make any money directly from that specific software, we like to think that we got the entire freely accessible world wide web and world of open source software in return. :-) And that was a really good deal. :-)

As I write on my own site, there are several forms of economic transactions (including subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft). Each has its own dynamics. They do interact with each other in various ways, but is is complex.

Personally, I feel we need a "basic income", like by expanding Social Security in the USA to everyman from birth, not just people over 65 years of age. Then everyone who wanted to write free software would have the time do do so. Hopefully, over time, a growing gift economy and a growing 3D-printer- and personal-robot- and solar-powered- subsistence economy might crowd out much of the exchange economy, in the same way the exchange economy crowded out much of the others in the last few decades.

In the meanwhile, I do mostly unrelated consulting work now and then to pay the bills. That's done well enough recently to give my wife time to make a free book on "Working with Stories In Your Community Or Organization"
http://www.workingwithstories....

And we're working on some software (likely free) to go with it. But soon enough it will probably be back to consulting or such...

Poetry from the 15th century: https://books.google.com/books...

"Peace makes plenty.
Plenty makes pride.
Pride breeds dispute.
Poverty's the fruit.
Poverty makes peace."

Other variations on the poem: https://books.google.com/books...

I got curious about that first phrase as it is the name of a Culture ship in Iain Bank's novel "Excession". :-)

And see also a funny sci-fi story about an alien invasion getting all the nations of the Earth to come together, like: "The Gentle Earth" by Christopher Anvil. :-) Or also "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

So yes, there may well be various social cycles in mood and expectations... Daniel Quinn explores those in his non-fiction book "Beyond Civilization". But I can hope it doesn't need to get that bad, and that we can relearn old truths from old stories less painfully than re-experiencing them first hand...

Anyway, glad we got a VIZIO a year or two ago. :-) Concerns about some smart features in other TVs (as previously discussed on Slashdot) did affect that choice. We barely use it though. It was mostly for use with a Wii and PlayStation, which have faded into the background compared to PC games like Space Engineers, Minecraft, and World of Tanks. Laptops (even a 14" Chromebook) are also much more convenient in our particular home for watching video together given where the VIZIO is. Still, the big VIZIO makes a great display for a tiny Raspberry Pi! :-)

But to think what my feelings were reading 1984 decades ago, and how impossible and fantastical it seemed to have spy cameras and spy recordings going on in every US home (along with Dick Tracy's impossible-seeming two-way wrist TV). And now we are pretty much there in terms of technology (even just laptops, let alone TVs). I hope we find better ways to use all that to build a happy healthy world that works for pretty much everyone.

That reduces blood flow to the brain as well as other vital organs. That clogging is typical on the Standard American diet, which causes arterial inflammation in multiple ways including sugar spikes and then supplies "bad" fats to repair them (as opposed to "good" fats which we absolutely need). Sadly, the first obvious symptom of clogged arteries may be death from a heart attack or stroke. Even when people detect clogging in the heart and put in stents to temporarily (ofter a few months) deal with it, stents do nothing for clogs in your brain or liver or elsewhere.

Check out the writings of people like Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, or Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn for a better way to eat that will also improve your brain power to be a better software developer.

In essence, the advice is eat more vegetables and fruits and beans, eat healthy fats like from avocados and nuts and/or free range pasture-fed animal products, get enough iodine like from seaweed and vitamin D from sunlight or supplements and B complex depending on other food sources, get extra micronutrients from seeds, eat whole grains meaning you can see the actual whole grain like a barley kernel in your food, eliminate most refined and processed foods including stuff made with white flour and processed sugar and especially processed meats with additives, eliminate synthetic additives like synthetic colorings and synthetic flavorings, avoid food with bromine in it as in many dough conditioners for breads, and so on. In general, eat a variety of foods of a variety of different colors (the colors reflect different essential phytonutrients). There are lots of nuances, and some things may not work well for everyone depending on your gut bacteria and genetics and lifestyle, so it may be a bit of a learning curve for what works for you. Most of that battle is actually won or lost in the supermarket, because once food is in the home, it is almost certain it will be eaten in reverse order of healthiness for various psychological and adaptive/evolutionary reasons.

See also this advice for if or more likely when you do fail a "stress test" for your heart and your cardiologist tries to rush you into getting a bunch of stents:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions. Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."

Sitting for long times is also problematical. Look into at least a standing desk, and maybe a treadmill workstation. Exercises and good breathing is important for health too, even if the connection to actual weight loss is more complex.

Good luck on possibly a very long journey towards wellness. One I've been on now for many years, but with its ups and downs, wins and losses, forward movements and setbacks. A natural reaction to excessive stress is also to eat more because in the past stress meant future meals are less certain so it was good to fatten up when you could. Over the long term, the social, psychological, community, and even spiritual aspects of this entire process become very important. It's not easy to become well in our culture, with so many highly-paid people working for processed food companies whose job is to catch us up and trap us or trick us and make us stumble including through constant advertising and engineered foodstuffs and also social pressure all so some food processor can privatize gains and socialized costs.

See also, for how aspects of such a change may be easier than most people think:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

And now that I search on that: http://www.medicalnewstoday.co...
"Majority of weight loss occurs 'via breathing' ... According to researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia, when weight is lost, the majority of it is breathed out as carbon dioxide. Their paper is published in the Christmas issue of The BMJ. Prof. Andrew Brown and Ruben Meerman reported widespread misconception regarding how weight is lost, finding physicians, dietitians and personal trainers all equally guilty of not knowing. ... The results suggest that the lungs are the main excretory organ for weight loss, with the H20 produced by oxidation departing the body in urine, feces, breath and other bodily fluids. On average, a person weighing 70 kg will exhale around 200 ml of CO2 in 12 breaths each minute. The authors calculate that each breath contains 33 mg of CO2, with 8.9 mg comprised of carbon. A total of 17,280 breaths during the day will get rid of at least 200 g of carbon, with roughly a third of this weight loss occurring during 8 hours of sleep. ..."

I've heard stuff now and then from Andrew Weil on breathing, and breathing well is at the core of Yoga, but your anecdote helps me make a better connection to all that. It may indeed apply very broadly. Thanks!

I've heard in general exercise is great for health (gets the lymph moving to boost the immune system, to begin with), but in general it does not affect weight loss much because people who exercise more tend to eat more after a workout as the body tries to compensate. However, I can wonder if changes in breathing patterns somehow work around that issue?

I would be curious if you had any good tips on what people can do to improve their breathing along the lines of what worked for you? Are they different than, for example, these exercises suggested by Dr. Andrew Weil?
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/AR...

BTW, one other thing missed in so much discussion here and elsewhere on weight is the psychological aspect. People can talk all they want about calories in and calories out, and even ignoring how the type of food and gut bacteria make a difference (as well as your point on breathing). However, as Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about, we essentially have an "appistat" like a thermostat for hunger, and what seems to control when it shuts off is how full we feel (in terms of physical bulk of fiber and such in the stomach) and also the amount of phytonutrients and micronutrients in the food. If you are not getting either (and the Standard American Diet tends to be lacking in *both*) then it is a continual psychological battle where your body is constantly telling you that you are not finished eating because of the lack of fiber and lack of good nutrients. So you keep eating junk (like processed white bread or sugary drinks), always searching for nutrition. The calories make you fat, but your body still thinks (correctly) that it is missing something, so it goes on trying to make you eat. And studies show that 95%+ of people on diets that focus on calories restriction fail in just a few months for this psychological aspect. We only have so much self-discipline. It is generally only when we change the nature of what we eat that we change our weight. Then we are using our self-discipline for only a short time (a few weeks) to change our eating habits and related taste preferences. After that, low-nutrient junk food generally is not so appealing. See also:
"How to Escape the Pleasure Trap"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

Although, your point on breathing certainly is another angle on that. As is the general issue on gut bacteria, since both of those affect how much of our food's energy is burned (without really changing much else) or how much is collected or goes through the gut. So, I'm not saying dietary choices in that sense are the only factor, although they may be ones that most people may have a bunch of control over. Although obviously breathing better is something that could be shaped, as you did. And in our culture, like most, where food is such a big part of social life, there is no question that it may seem like what we eat often is beyond our control. A lot of times a move to better health can be a positive spiral. So, I can imagine that focusing on breathing better may lead to better feeling which may lead to more positive energy to make dietary changes that may lead to more energy to exercise better and again breath better, which may provide more energy for even more dietary improvements, and so on for an upward spiral.

While this is in general great practical advice (and no doubt hard won), I can quibble about your point #3 on complex dependency graphs requiring rewrites as the "only way out". Certainly this is more of an issue in C++ than something like Java where code can be more easily replaced at runtime. However, at least in Java, the idea of "mocking" can sometimes be useful to test code even with complex dependencies without (significant) initial rewriting.

I used mocking with JMockit successfully in the large Java project previously mentioned. I tried other frameworks, but preferred that one. JMockit supported creating unit tests for code which was not originally designed to be testable and had complex interdependencies in how objects were constructed. However, JMockit did have a substantial learning curve, even aside from hours spent trying to come up with tests for domain-specific specific code. Eventually I created some supporting code to make the mocking easier for our project, and then another developer improved even further on my work, making mocking our specific application much easier. So, at least in our situation, with a huge complex Java codebase in production, limited developer time, and limited tests initially, mocking was a big win IMHO that let us start to get a handle on everything without having to rewrite a lot of code at first.

That said, in general, code is easier to maintain and understand when it does not have complex dependencies. "Dependency Injection" is a good idea in a lot of cases -- although it can have its own downsides in making object construction code harder to follow:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

So, while I'm quibbling about "only way forward" because of the possibility of mocking, I'm not saying rewriting in such situations in necessarily a bad idea or even quicker than mocking sometimes -- especially as mocking can introduce its own issues.

With JMockit, one such unexpected issue was that mocking an object created mocks up the entire class hierarchy (causing issues when you wanted to mock one class but test a sibling class). This was a subtle issue that took a while to understand, and I did not see documented explicitly anywhere (at least in introductory material) although I think there was a bug/feature request about it somewhere.

Another JMockit issue was that mocks were instantiated and removed in relation to threading somehow and there could be issues with mocks remaining in place when previous unit tests had not completely finished running all their threads. This could sometimes lead to unit tests failing occasionally due to thread timing issues and the mocking, when a class that was mocked in one test or with certain "expectations" was then accessed by another unit test which mocked different objects or had different "expectations". Sometimes this (unfortunately) happened embarrassingly on other developer's machines with different OS or hardware or on our Hudson/Jenkins build server just by the force of numbers of times the tests were run. Usually I could get around these cases either by adding delays at the end of the unit test to let all the threads complete or, better, by having improved mocks or other code that ensured the threads were finished before the test ended.

That said, even with both of these issues, both frustrating to understand and then work around, mocking was still a big win for the project IMHO.

I have not used any C++ mocking frameworks so I don't know how well they work or what their limits are. However, for suggestions about some such frameworks see this StackOverflow discussion:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

The top rated answer there is about "Google Mock" but there are other choices.
https://code.google.com/p/goog...

I do not see the word "mock" used so far in this Slashdot discussion of tools for cleaning up C++ projects. I'd be curious what people's experiences are with C++ mocking frameworks, especially in comparison with what you can do with something like JMockit in Java?

Yeah, I feel that way too... See also my other comment to this story (which links to my Jan 15 comment).
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Or, as it says here:
""This Is Why RadioShack Is in Trouble"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
"Feb. 2 -- Radio Shack is in talks to close half it's stores and convert the other half into Spirit mobile shops. If that happens will anyone even notice? Bloomberg took to the streets of San Francisco to ask potential customers how much they really know about Radio Shack. The lack of knowledge or attachment to the brand illustrates just why Radio Shack is going broke."

I'm still attached to the brand somehow from my memories of the 1970s and early 1980s though, and so I am saddened by this news, but I also felt for decades that the brand is no longer what I remember and so the 1990s-2010s RadioShack is not really *my* RadioShack. Although, since I also went to RS together with my father, if he is not around now, it can't ever be the same in that sense, and my own kid has different interests in any case, sigh.

And of course there are also some bad memories from the 1970s-1980s of the difficulty of actually purchasing anything as they wanted your address and phone and so on for every tiny order; I guess it was a good exercise in eventually learning to say "no thanks" to such requests. :-) But even with that, it was a positive experience overall to have a place to go that somehow seemingly respected the tinkerer and the learner (even if it charged 2X for lesser components that what I later learned you could get mail order -- the cost of having a storefront I guess). Nowadays, makerspaces and online forums may be filling that need more. It's too bad RS could not connect better to that, even though they tried some at the end with Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

Sears faced the same sort of challenge tracking changing needs. With the history of the Sears mail order catalog, one might have expected that Sears should have dominated internet sales, but Sear's web presence was poor, and they lost that emerging space to Amazon. Likewise, one might have expected that, in theory, Radio Shack's online presence could have been what Make Magazine, AdaFruit, and so on became. Or why did RS not make something like the Raspberry Pi? Or the BeagleBone (which is from that group working with *Texas* Instruments)? So, some missed opportunities in leadership (in retrospect, which is easy to say with 20/20 hindsight).

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"Yeah, sad for me too. When I was a kid, in the late 1970s, with an interest in robotics and computers., my father and I would visit Radio Shacks to get various parts for my projects. ..."

I was tempted to follow creimer's example from that discussion and buy some stock or options hoping for a bounce, but I guess financially now I'm glad I didn't:
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
"Radio Shack has been preparing for bankruptcy for years. There's nothing new in the WSJ report that haven't already been reported before. Radio Shack stock price dived to $0.26 this morning and climbing back up. I bought 80 shares @ $0.48 on Tuesday. I might buy more share later. This is a long shot bet that might triple or lose my money."

Still might have been fun just for the nostalgia though, like by getting the actual stock certificates. Sorry buying RS stock recently was apparently not profitable you, creimer. You might want to request the actual certificates and hope they become collector's items eventually? See:
http://www.investopedia.com/as...
"Before online brokers and personally-directed accounts, holding a physical stock certificate was a necessity, as this was the only way to authenticate stock ownership. This is not the case anymore. Although you may not need to hold a stock certificate, you may request one. The corporation you are holding stock in issues stock certificates, and you can get your certificate either directly from the issuing corporation, or by contacting your broker who may get the stock certificate on your behalf.
      Detailed on the stock certificate itself will be your name, the company's name and the number of shares you own. There also will be a seal of authenticity, a signature from someone with assigning authority authenticating the certificate and either a CUSIP or CINS number. Currently, stock certificates are seen more as collectibles and souvenirs than actual records of ownership.
    On the other hand, corporations may not have an interest in sending all shareholders stock certificates, although they are required to by law if requested. ..."

In any case, even if not totally unexpected, sad news...