Thanks for the clarification.

Last I check raising cattle IS agriculture.

I read an interesting article about how ethanol really can be similar to gas, parituclar in an engine designed for gas. http://www.radford.edu/wkovarik/papers/fuel.htm

It seems as if ethanol is actually a good fuel when an engine is tuned properly. It is used for racing already, most motorsports use pure ethanol as it has a higher octane rating which allows the production of more horsepower. If you tune and gear an engine properly you should easily be able to get similar mileage. The problem with flex fuel cars is that they are still tuned for their main source of fuel, traditional gas.

Ethonol also eliminates the need for a catalytic converter to eliminate engine knocking. If it can be produced using land which is inefficent for other agriculural uses such as west texas ranch land where hundres of acres are need per cow or argicultural byproducts such as corn cobs it is a great alternative to traditional petrolium based fuel. I never drank the corn based ethanol Koolaid, but an economical cellulosic based ethanol sounds very promising.

Good point. We should just do what the Saudi's do and cut a hand off on the first offense and forget prison. Most thieves in Saudi don't steal again. After the second chance they have a very hard time doing anything so the problem is solved all on its own although when I lived there in the 90's there was a guy who had run out of hands, they had moved on to his feet until he ran out of them, the fifth offense was his head. This was in the paper over there, I'm not sure I believe it because I don't know how you can steal very well with no hands and no feet but somehow the paper did report that he was going to be excuted in the town square on a Friday.

I would have to disagree with your conclusion. Scientists can be celebrities in any country. The celebrities you speak of have social skills. In the US many scientists have taken on celbrity status, look at Stephen Hawings (while not from the US he is celebrated in this country), Michio Kaku, as well as many others. They all have social skills which MUST be developed in order to attain their status. Other than fellow scientists, who really cares about your chosen subject unless you can explain to them why it is important.

Don't get me wrong, it is not acceptible to abuse other people, I am not at all in favor of beating people up or picking on them. I am not saying that victoms aren't victoms, just that building social skills is critical if you want to be part of society. You can have an IQ of 180 but if you can't communicate with anyone why should anyone else care?

EMC has a great product but it may be overkill. ApplicationXTender, in its most basic form, can do everything you are looking for. It is not cheap but it can handle any document type (although the built in viewer works only for PDF, TIFF, and MS Office documents to my knowledge). ApplicationXTender can also intgrate with any ODMA compatible application to allow new documents to be indexed and stored within the document management system. It can integrate with many other applications using an Integration module (for example you could index information from an invoice and send it directly into an accounting package as a new accounts payable item to be processed which is really powerfull if combined with a good scanning package such as Kofax which can automatically recognize a document and OCR the index fields it set up for, calculate its level of confidence, and automatically release the document or prompt a user to verify what it has read based on the confidence level). The client can run as a desktop application or as a web appliction.

Annotations can be added without checking a document out. Actually editing an editble document requires checking it out. Annotations can be as simple as highlighting something or as detailed as drawings and text. With press of a button annotation appear or dissapear.

The database back end can be MS SQL (express or full blown), MySQL, Oracle, as well as others. Some add-ons require full blown MS SQL but the basic system can run on a quite a large number of platforms. The software is modular so each add-on service can be put on any supported server. The license server (the most important part of the system since nothing works without it) seems to only run on Windows 2003 Server at this point but 2008 support is supposed to be out in a couple of months. I don't think they ever plan to release it for Linux.

The Web Server (if desired) requires IIS. EMC supports SUSE as a web client so it should work ony any Linux as long as you have Firefox (I did a quick web search and did find some Linux users having trouble trying to access something using Opera and Firefox but the error indicated an old version of ApplicationXTender).

ApplicationXTender is HIPAA complient and has a full audit trail so any changes to anything are logged. I don't let my users change index fields and since only TIFF documents are currently being stored only annotations can be added by a user which does not impact the original document I really have no use for the logs but I can definately see where it could be usefull. Office documents are strored as revisions so you can always revert to an earlier version and know who did what. Additional add-ons can allow full-text indexing (requires SQL Server) and document workflow.

I only use the basic system and use another software package (Kofax) to scan and automatically index documents which is very nice. Kofax can check what it reads against a user defined list which improves accuracy for certain field (such as a clients name). It can also use a database query to fill in information to be indexed which is great for accounting records (look up a vendor ID and fill in the full name for example). I also use another package (PlanetPress) to capture print streams index the document and send them directly into the system. Currently I am only using the system for accounting records and some rather static historical files. I plan to add the workflow module but it is expensive and I have to develop my strategy for capturing mail as it comes into our office (we get tons of it for a company of our size, it takes one person about 2-3 hours to open and sort on an average day, some days it can take all day when we get certain types of monthly bills. The number of different documents that come in also make this difficult to automate. A large portion of our business is record keeping and book keeping for our clients and the payoff on the system is very evident. What used to take hours of manual labor to find and put together can now be done in a matter of seconds.

We have about 50 different "document types" for about 100 customers stored in the system (totaling about 500,000 pages with an average document containing about 5 pages, almost all TIFF images of scanned documents (tiffs are much better than PDF's for storage)). The client will start an email with attachments and convert the TIFF inages into PDF documents. I have not moved our typcial office documents into the system yet but do plan to in the future but I have a few issues with our current employees and their levels of computer literacy. I can only make so many changes on them at a time before they start to get confused and mess everything up.

In order to help keep typically MS Office documents, txt files, xml documents, and the like organized we use standard naming conventions and a faily well thought out file system stucture. I have also set up MS Search Server to allow mislabled or misplaced documents to be found rather quickly (some users just never learn, and some documents are just so specialized that 6 months later you can never remember what you would have called it or where you would have stored it).

There you have it, this is my companies document management system and it seems to work quite well. I could definately improve on it. Adding a document workflow system would make some thing so much easier, by removing to-do list maintenance from our plates and allowing better oversight of our employees work and a full text document index would also be a significant improvement but issues with OCR reliability still not make a full-text index completely reliable. Hopefully this helps.

I have tried SharePoint and hated it. Don't get me wrong, SharePoint is not that bad but I do not like the feel of it, it is not as capable as ApplicationXTender and offers less integration options. SharePoint offers some features unavailble in ApplicationXTender but they are not important to my business while the rich integration options avalable with ApplicationXTender make it much more powerfull. When it comes down to it each organization must determine what its needs are before deciding to use one of these systems. Most of our document work is not collaborative, a manager writes a document, admin proofs and mails it. We rarely work as a team on large documents, most of what we work with is essentially form letters. Our main needs were space (disk space is a lot cheaper than the equivalent square footage) and ability to find documents cheaply. Longer term part of the plan is to minimize paper usage which we have started but we are no where near what we want. If you really just want to collaborate on large documents SharePoint may be a better solution but a solid evaluation of your needs and a payback calculation is more important that a great product with tons of features you (or the users) will never use.

Not in my back yard

I do not belive that more "goods and services" are always better for us, but societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and required rationing, only that in order to have one thing one must give up something else.

Just for me to sit here and enjoy a healty debate means that I am sacrificing one scarce resource for another. I am giving up my time (definately a scare resource being a business owner), which could be used chasing women, working on bettering my business, watching TV, reading a novel, or just about anything else, in order to express my thoughts. In my mind this is a rational decision (which I call greed) because I see more benefit in doing this right now as it is too early to go out, I am tired of work after a hard day, and don't really feel like killing brain cells in front of the TV.

While pre-agricultural societies may not have had the rich and famous type of elites we have today, they did have an elite class, usually called tribal leaders or chiefs. As agriculture caught on and more people were able to be fed the chiefs became kings controlling more land giving rise to the need for another class of elites called the aristocricy (yes, I really moved through time fast). In the modern era we have even more classes, regardless of the society we live in (capitalist democracies or commuunist dictatorships, it really doesn't matter).

The real world is not as the novels you point me to describe. Even if you owned all of California, accessing its resources is NOT FREE. Someone must gather the sand, mine the gold, and harvest food. All of these have a cost in economic terms.

Economic theory doesn't only describe what happens in a caplitalistic society, and can even describe, relatively accuratly, what happens in a communist country with price controls. Price controls ultimately lead to more scarcity as their is less supply as people find more valuable things to do with their time when they don't get enough gain from producing a product any more. Then you end up with either a total lack of resources or huge jumps in prices. Look at cold war era Moscow for a prime example, people had to wait in lines for bread for longer than it takes to make a loaf of bread.

In my view of the world, any resource has a cost, even if it seems free. If I want clean air then I need to reduce polution, this means I must reduce my use of fossil fuels or develop a new technology to clean the pollution out of them. If I want more free time then I work less and give up money which means that I have less money to spend on hobbies I enjoy meaning that my free time becomes less valuable.

The traditional view that economics is about money, is wrong, it is about supply and demand in a world with scarce resources, NOT always rare resources. Yes, things can be cheap, wheat today costs much less today than back in the 1600's before any industrial equipment was used in agriculture. As you mentioned earlier, only 2% of the American workforce is employed producing food, this is because technology has allowed us to streamline production of this resource. The cost, in terms of man hours, has significantly decreased. The introduction of industrial methods created the need for other resources such as steel and energy in the form of fossil fuels. We started with steam power, moved on to internal combustion engines and electric power. Electricty allowed us to develop new tools to help maximize efficiency such as computers and robotics. All of these new resources have a cost in terms of polution, or even just the oppportunity cost of all of those worked puting their time into engineering, manufacturing, and marketing a new product. All of these inputs require vast resources, regardles of if the resource is easy to come by they all of costs associated with gathering and assembling them into something usefull.

The stone age man who went hunting had to sacrifce his time hunting to get food, which I am sure he would rather have used producing offspring or just enjoying the view of a nearby lake. His life may have been great, I am sure I would enjoy spending my days more in touch with nature, but the fact still remains that there is always a cost to anything.

I can't really envision a world in which everything is truely free. In fact I don't think I would even want to live in such a world, it seems like it would be very boring to have nothing to strive for, no way to feel like a winner, and no "losses" to compare the "gains" to.

This dream world you describe world where energy is free, robots do everything, and we can all sit on our butts all day and do nothing but eat, drink, and be merry sounds great on its surface. The problem with this is that this defies human nature. Personally, I enjoy my job (most of the time), am proud of the services I provide my customers, and enjoy not having to wonder where my next meal comes from. I realize that there are others out there who want what I have or strive to get what I want and am quite okay with this concept.

As I stated in my previous post, I am not saying that we live in a perfect world, we definately do not. Economic theory is also not a prefect science, it misses some of human nature. It would be hard to reliably predict when people decide to give and when they want to steal. People tend to give the most in the worst of times, exacly opposite of what would be expected unless you consider the benefits people gain by "feeling food" when they donate something of value. The fact of the matter is that humans are not perfect. Humans have many emotions and undesirable charactaristics. We have greed, anger, hate, lust(well maybe this one isn't always bad), and the list goes on and on. Even in a world where everything was percieved to be free there is some type of cost associated with needs, wants, and actions we all perform. Even some of the "highly respected" economists of the world seem to miss the concept that humans are often very bad people. Greenspan seemed to think that the market would self correct no matter how uneven the playing field was and we can see the consequences of his beliefs with the current economic crisis. While people can be very good, we also have the potential to be very bad.

A world with unlimited resources actually sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Unlimited "free" resources in the hands of good people with sound morals is even problematic if you consider the saying "abosolute power corrupts absolutely." I can't even imagine unlimited resources in the hands of some of the really bad people in this world.

There are two underlying principles to economic theory (in their simplest forms): 1) All resources are scarce. 2) People are greedy.

One could argue about the merits of these three underlying principles but I have yet to ever see an example of a human society where these principles break down.

I would agree that with almost any given resource technological advances have led to a decline in real costs for such resources. There are examples to the contrary such as our recent facination with protecting the environment (While not really a tree hugger I am an avid backpacker and fisherman and em enthusiastic about protecting the enviroment). Now the environment costs us much more than it did 100 years ago. Just because the cost goes down, or there is an overabundance does not make a resource free. The perfect example is with energy. The sun does provide Earth with more power than humans really ever anticipate using as we would probably run out of food production capacity before power if we covered the earth with PV cells. With that said there is a cost to harness that energy. If there is a cost the resource is scarce.

Again with the air we breathe there is a cost. Yes, if we didn't tamper with the environment we would have an overabundance of clean air. But not tampering with the enviorment is the cost of clean air. That means giving something up. When economists speak about scarcity it is in this context. One must give something up in order to get something else.

Scaricity in itself doesn't prop up the elite, that is what every human culture has done since the advent of civilization. Look at communist sociecieties, they have an eleite class jsut like a capitalist society.

Services are just as much a resource as a tangible item. People place a value on any given service. Don't most slashdot readers value their internet connection which relies on a vast array of service technicians which produce no tangible product but provide us with something we want?

I have never indicated that I actually agree with how society is organized, but it seems that human nature has set us on this path. It may not be the best theoretical way but economics is not an attempt to recreate society based on rules that defy our nature... Economics is about predict human behavior based on emperical evidence.

While I think your post was quite interesting (great references, they were interesting to read), I think you are missing a key concept of economics... All resources are scarce, therefore there is no such thing as "post scarcity." I also think you have missed the point that economics is not as much about predicting a market as it is about predicting human behavior in a market. While people are very unpredicible, often making poor decisions, most economists would blame this on an imbalance of information in the system. I had a very hard time understing how economists believe that people make rational decisions when there is so much evidence to the contrary, but in general they do make the best decisions they can with the information at hand, their individual level of understanding, and their own self interests at heart. Yes, many resources have become cheap and abundant but even the air we rely on to sustain us is scarce. The EPA was formed in part to help protect our air and water resources by adding regulations and creating penalties for non-compliance thus adding a "cost" to the air we breathe. In the digital age we tend to forget that we must give up something in order to take advantage of something else, we must pay to have Internet access (instead of buying a few extra six-packs of beer), we must take our limited time in order to surf the Internet and post on Slashdot. Name a resource and I can demonstrate its scarcity. There will never be such a thing as a "post scarcity" world, even hydrogen is scarce as there is only so much of it in the universe. I would go as far as to believe that as time goes on resources will become even more scarce (in general). Technology allows us to make some resources obsolete but generally puts an emphasis on new resources. I think humans will forever be chasing the ball of unlimited resources. The theory that fusion has the potential to provide free unlimited power is faulty, containing such a powerful source of energy will definately cost more than just the "free" energy of the system, someone will have to monitor the system to ensure it is safe, if that entity monitoring the system is a robot, it will have taken up other resources which could have been used elsewhere. There will be a cost, albeit lower than current costs. I think we would both agree that traditional economic models do not predict human behavior all that well, but they do have some value when applied in context.