And also eating more vegetables and fruits (such as Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work or Dr. Andrew Weil's work) to reduce inflammation. You might also be sensitive to some compounds in food, such as in the nightshade family (like tomatoes) or possibly other things (food additives, etc.)
If you want true alternatives. gold and guns/ammo won't help. All that can be confiscated.
I collected some better solutions at this link and elsewhere on my site:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Learning more about health creation for yourself falls in part under subsistence production... And also the gift economy,,,
Glad to here about your success story! If you want to take your success to the next level, you may find this of interest:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/...
http://www.amazon.com/The-End-...
"This New York Times best seller offers a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse diabetesâ"without drugs. Diabetes does not have to shorten your life span or result in high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness or other life-threatening ailments. In fact, most type 2 diabetics can get off medication and become 100 percent healthy in just a few simple steps. This book offers no compromises, it is the most aggressive and effective approach to reverse obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease; which typically accompany type 2 diabetes. The information about Type 1 diabetes is simply life saving. It is a must read for every diabetic, as well as any nutritionally-aware person wanting to understand the failure of conventional medical care for diabetic treatments and the "no-brainer" of using nutritional excellence, not drugs."
And see:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disea...
The grand parent poster said quadrupling *vegetables* (many of which are leafy greens like Kale) not "complex carbs"... And there are much healthier things to eat than cancer-implicated processed lunchmeat if you want to eat meat...
Also, exercise does not help much with weight loss because it stimulates the appetite, even though exercise in general is good for health...
Also, for yet another different perspective (on how the recommendations decades ago to avoid fat on the theory it made people fat have instead led to an epidemic of obesity and heart disease by leading people to eat too much sugar):
http://healthimpactnews.com/20...
Good luck staying with what is working for you and maybe even going further which might then free up energy for your titanic plans!
See the chart here: http://automattic.com/work-wit...
Granted there are many people who contribute to the WordPress ecosystem who don't formally work for Automattic given the FOSS nature of WordPress and related plugins. It's just a very different 21st century way of doing business compared to the 20th century Microsoft model, and is doing a better job of bridging the exchange and gift economies (like I talk about on my site).
Automattic, which shepherds the core of WordPress, sounds like a great place to work for people like me who are comfortable working from home. The future for WordPress looks pretty amazing, especially given ever better JSON/AJAX RESTful support for JavaScript-powered frontend apps. See also:
http://inside.envato.com/the-f...
"For those willing to ignore the prevailing opinions in the programming community, Tom Willmot says that WordPress presents developers with incredible opportunities, and a wonderful sense of community:
I've been looking at shifting my own "Pointrel" and "Twirlip" projects, my wife's "Rakontu" and "NarraCat" projects and other similar work (stuff related to participative narrative inquiry, civic sensemaking, public intelligence, social semantic desktop tools, educational simulations, and more) to have JavaScript frontends that use WordPress as an application server backend (rather than have them run stand-alone). That would make it easy for millions of WordPress users who might want such tools to install them as a WordPress plugin with a couple clicks. As Alan Kay said about Squeak, getting people to install anything to try it is hard. Other benefits would include easy authentication support. I expect more and more projects by other people will be moving in that direction. I'm tempted to apply to work at Automattic myself at some point given their FOSS focus. They are also hiring as they got a bunch of venture financing recently. But I would want to make at least a demo of that integration first. I plan on putting such a demo here when it works: http://twirlip.com/
Of course, JavaScript has problems (globals by default), PHP has problems (such a long list..), and WordPress has problems (no doubt), with many problems coming from their historical roots and a need for backward-compatibility. But I can't deny all three won some battle for mindshare for whatever reasons (especially ease of initial use), and when you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right?
See also on the value of having a diversity of programmers of a variety of experience levels in an organization:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
What I especially envision is that all those millions of WordPress sites could start talking to each other in interesting ways... See also Theodore Sturgeon's 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" for where it all might lead...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
https://archive.org/details/pr...
Or as I reprise here:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org...
"Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense."
http://slashdot.org/story/07/0...
While I agree with the validity of your points for the next 10 to 20 years, in the longer term, better design and better tools will make it cheaper to completely rebuild houses so they are lower maintenance, more energy efficient, and easier to clean and maintain by robotics or by modular snap in replacements like the grandparent poster suggested. The only reason not to bulldoze older housing in a world of cheap energy and cheap robotics would be for historical preservation reasons or perhaps sentimentality (although Virtual Reality could address some of the sentimentality aspect).
This is similar to how people are now generally getting rid of old computer equipment (especially cellphones) when a capacitor or battery goes bad rather and replacing it with something new rather than trying to take it apart and repair the component like 50 years ago. "Computers" used to cost millions of dollars and take up rooms, now you can put a few in your pocket. I don't know what the equivalent shift for housing is, but we will no doubt find out. Some speculations are VR and pods like the Matrix or like in Marshall Brain's "Manna", or even just complete simulation of uploaded humans "living" in silicon RAM instead of air-filled wooden houses?
See also Marshall Brain's "Manna" for a suggestion of how computer-given instructions delivered by wearables could turn almost every profession, even plumbing, into a micromanaged low-wage nightmare before general robotics arrive:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
I hope we get a basic income (BI) and/or other broad economic changes before then. Something I put together on that a few years ago:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
...about structural unemployment and a basic income: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You make good points. See also: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past."
I think a "basic income" for all could be part of the solution, because a BI would make it possible for anyone to live like a graduate student and do independent research if they wanted.
https://github.com/kogmbh/WebO...
I like Dojo in part because it attempts to make all the core widgets accessible. From:
http://dojotoolkit.org/referen...
"Dojo has made a serious commitment to creating a toolkit that allows the development of accessible Web applications for all users, regardless of physical abilities. The core widget set of Dojo, dijit, is fully accessible since the 1.0 release, making Dojo the only fully accessible open source toolkit for Web 2.0 development. This means that users who require keyboard only navigation, need accommodations for low vision or who use an assistive technology, can interact with the dijit widgets."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus.
So, the academics you knew were from before the "Big Crunch". Such people advised me, from their success, and meaning well, to get a PhD. But the world I faced was post-Big-Crunch and so their advice did not actually make much sense (although it took me a long time to figure that out).
More related links:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
From: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
---
Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias.
Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas.
Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India.
---
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
"This was a 4-y, population-based, double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial. The primary outcome was fracture incidence, and the principal secondary outcome was cancer incidence."
Eating a lots of vegetables and fruits and mushrooms can also reduce cancer risk (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's summary works like "Eat To Live" with many references). I've found by eating more fruits and vegetables that my skin tone has changed from pale to having more color (even in winter). Adequate iodine can also help prevent cancer.
Reducing risk of incidence is not the same as cure though. Sorry to hear about you father getting cancer. Once you get cancer, everything is iffy, so cancer is best avoided preventatively. Fasting may also help in some cancer situations, and it also helps with chemotherapy by protecting cells from the toxic chemicals (since fasting seems to causes many normal cells to go into a safe survival mode but cancer cells generally do not). And eating better may hope prevent recurrence. In general, the human body is always developing cancerous cells, but generally they are dealt with by the immune system. So boosting the immune system could help with some cancers and there are many ways to do that -- but again, it is all iffy once cancer is established.
See also for other ideas:
http://science-beta.slashdot.o...
I agree supplements and natural sunlight are probably better choices than tanning beds --although there may still be unknowns about how the skin reacts to sun or tanning beds and produces many compounds vs. supplements. I also agree conventional tanning beds are not tuned to give lots of vitamin D.That is unfortunate, even if they produce some. See also about other tanning choices (and supplement suggestions):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
"If you choose to use a tanning bed, the Vitamin D Council recommends using the same common sense you use in getting sunlight. This includes:
Getting half the amount of exposure that it takes for your skin to turn pink.
Using low-pressure beds that has good amount of UVB light, rather than high-intensity UVA light."
BTW, if you look into chemotherapy for cancer, for many cancers you'll find it is of questionable value relative to the costs both in money and suffering, where is on average may add at most a couple months of life on average if that. Chemotherapy can apparently even sometimes make cancer worse:
http://www.nydailynews.com/lif...
"The scientists found that healthy cells damaged by chemotherapy secreted more of a protein called WNT16B which boosts cancer cell survival."
It's hard to know who to trust regarding medical research results or interpretations:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"
Good luck sorting it all out. I've suggested creating better tools for medical sensemaking, but still not time to work on them...
While you make a good point, nutrition works right now (along with exercise, good sleep, a less stressful lifestyle, avoiding hazards like smoking, community connectedness, and so on like in "Blue Zones"). The rest of life extension is just a hope that maybe we can create new technologies. Also, for most people, if they can make it in good health to 100+ years old via such well-proved things, they will then be around for more breakthroughs in the next 50+ years.
Also, probably most invasive life extension technologies for extreme longevity could also be turned into biological weapons (like rewriting DNA or reorganizing the brain). So, we may end up with technologies that could allow people to live in good health for 1000s of years, have any skin color or nose shape they want, and people will use them to kill off everyone else that has a different skin color or nose shape then they currently have (which would be very sadly ironic). Improved nutrition does not have that existential risk associated with it for the most part.
http://www.corporatecrimerepor...
Fines or imprisoning CEOs do little to change the pattern of relationships and values and policies that make an organization what it is, any more than a human body loosing some skill cells or even brain cells usually changes how a person behaves very much.
Seriously, why should any corporate communications have any expectation of privacy? Corporations with "limited liability" are chartered for the public interest. 150 years ago, US Americans put such creatures on very short leashes because they had seen what trouble resulted from big British corporations in the American colonies. Individuals have now lost pretty much all informational privacy due to large corporations and the current internet. Why should bigger more powerful creatures than humans like corporation have more privacy in practice than humans? See also David Brin's "The Transparent Society". Any argument that corporations need privacy (like for salaries or payments for services) for some sort of commercial advantage is trumped by the public interest in understanding what corporations are doing and also that if all corporations were transparent there would be a level playing field. Granted, it would require new ways of doing business, but books like "Honest Business" also extol the value of "open books". Or perhaps corporations should be forced to choose -- if they want limited liability for shareholders then they need to be transparent; if every shareholder accepts full responsibility for all actions of the organization, then they can have privacy?
And see also my comments from 2000, the relevant section copied below (sadly a lot of links there have rotted):
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
========= machine intelligence is already here =========
I personally think machine evolution is unstoppable, and the best hope
for humanity is the noble cowardice of creating refugia and trying, like
the duckweed, to create human (and other) life faster than other forces
can destroy it. [Well, I now in 2014 think there are also other options, like symbiosis, maybe friendly AI, and in general trying to be nicer to each other like with a basic income in hopes that leads to a happier singularity...]
Note, I'm not saying machine evolution won't have a human component --
in that sense, a corporation or any bureaucracy is already a separate
machine intelligence, just not a very smart or resilient one. This sense
of the corporation comes out of Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous
Technology: Technics out of control as a theme in political thought".
http://www.rpi.edu/~winner/
You may have a tough time believing this, but Winner makes a convincing
case. He suggests that all successful organizations "reverse-adapt"
their goals and their environment to ensure their continued survival.
These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better
machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more
resilient. People forget that corporate charters used to be routinely
revoked for behavior outside the immediate public good, and that
corporations were not considered persons until around 1886 (that
decision perhaps being the first major example of a machine using the
political/social process of its own ends).
http://www.adbusters.org/magaz...
Corporate charters are granted supposedly because society believe it is
in the best interest of *society* for corporations to exist.
But, when was the last time people were able to pull the "charter" plug
on a corporation not acting in the public interest? It's hard, and it
will get harder when corporations don't need people to run themselves.
http://www.adbusters.org/magaz...
http://www.adbusters.org/campa...
I'm not saying the people in corporations are evil -- just that they
often have very limited choices of actions. If a corporate CEOs do not
deliver short term profits they are removed, no matter what they were
trying to do. Obviously there are exceptions for a while -- William C.
Norris of Control Data was one of them, but in general, the exception
proves the rule. Fortunately though, even in the worst machines (like in
WWII Germany) there were individuals who did what they could to make
them more humane ("Schindler's List" being an example).
Look at how much William C. Norris http://www.neii.com/wnorris.ht... of
Control Data got ridiculed in the 1970s for suggesting the then radical
notion that "business exists to meet society's unmet needs". Yet his
pioneering efforts in education, employee assistance plans, on-site
daycare, urban renewal, and socially-responsible investing are in
part what made Minneapolis/St.Paul the great area it is today. Such
efforts are now being duplicated to an extent by other companies. Even
the company that squashed CDC in the mid 1980s (IBM) has adopted some of
those policies and directions. So corporations can adapt when they feel
the need.
Obviously, corporations are not all powerful. The world still has some
individuals who have wealth to equal major corporations. There are
several governments that are as powerful or more so than major
corporations. Individuals in corporations can make persuasive pitches
about their future directions, and individuals with controlling shares
may be able to influence what a corporation does (as far as the market
allows). In the long run, many corporations are trying to coexist with
people to the extent they need to. But it is not clear what corporations
(especially large ones) will do as we approach this singularity -- where
AIs and robots are cheaper to employ than people. Today's corporation,
like any intelligent machine, is more than the sum of its parts
(equipment, goodwill, IP, cash, credit, and people). It's "plug" is not
easy to pull, and it can't be easily controlled against its short term
interests.
What sort of laws and rules will be needed then? If the threat of
corporate charter revocation is still possible by governments and
collaborations of individuals, in what new directions will corporations
have to be prodded? What should a "smart" corporation do if it sees
this coming? (Hopefully adapt to be nicer more quickly.
individuals and governments do to ensure corporations "help meet
society's unmet needs"?
Evolution can be made to work in positive ways, by selective breeding,
the same way we got so many breeds of dogs and cats. How can we
intentionally breed "nice" corporations that are symbiotic with the
humans that inhabit them? To what extent is this happening already as
talented individuals leave various dysfunctional, misguided, or rouge
corporations (or act as "whistle blowers")? I don't say here the
individual directs the corporation against its short term interest. I
say that individuals affect the selective survival rates of
corporations with various goals (and thus corporate evolution) by where
they choose to work, what they do there, and how they interact with
groups that monitor corporations. To that extent, individuals have some
limited control over corporations even when they are not shareholders.
Someday, thousands of years from now, corporations may finally have been
bred to take the long term view and play an "infinite game".
More fundamental CS though: http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galle...
My proposals: https://www.changemakers.com/m...
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
And also advice to Larry from that my own individual sensemaking from 2012:
"Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"
https://groups.google.com/foru...
No man is an island if he's on at least one mailing list.
