That song, "Peter Paul and Mary: Because All Men Are Brothers", reminds me of the new movie "Senn" which we watched last night. Specifically, the PPM lyrics of: "My brother's fears are my fears, yellow white and brown. My brother's tears are my tears the whole wide world around."
"Senn" is an impressive movie, especially considering it was produced supposedly for only US$15000. That goes to show what modern technology and an internet-connected gift economy can do nowadays.
http://sennition.com/
This is a bit of a spoiler, but the connection is because of a key aspect of the movie's plot relates to humans' feeling each others emotions and how that changes how they behave, especially in a corporate context.
Which also reminds me of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy."
And some people labelled sociopaths or psychopaths may not have much of these feelings or may feel them more selectively.
"Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch"
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
Yet many of our corporate and political leaders at these point may fit that description...
And what do you do with various criminals who often engage in psychopathic behavior? And by whose definitions? Put your "brother" in jail?
And in a big city, given out current economic paradigm, people may also need to learn to switch off or decrease empathy in some way just to survive thousands of interpersonal encounters an hour when walking down the street...
On this plane of existence, there seems to be a complexity of human (and other) life existing in practice at a middle ground between chaos and stasis, competition and cooperation, fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, and so on.
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
The Lathe of Heaven (as another spoiler) has a section where the protagonist wishes for "world peace", and it is accomplished by the appearance of an alien invasion of the moon, which unites all humanity in opposition...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
So, while we should be careful what we wish for, and things are complex, still, there are so many possible environmental menaces that more cooperation is in order, IMHO. But it is never quite so simple as "all men are brothers". After all, sadly, even "brothers" sometimes fight each other like in the US Civil War.
Still, our culture may shape how competition or aggression is expressed or channeled into more positive directions. Like Mr. Fred Rogers' sings: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" As with Haber, a chemist can figure out a way to feed billions of people with nitrogenous fertilizer, or they can figure out how to kill large numbers of people with poison gas, or, in Haber's case, a chemist can even do both. The irony is that Haber's doing the first (to feed people) made doing the second (to kill people) unnecessary -- except that politics has taken a century to catch up with the potential of his (and others') inventions.
Likewise, even now, imagine what we could have had if the USA had invested three trillion US dollars on fusion energy research and better batteries and solar panels and energy efficiency -- instead of incurring that much and more on the Iraq war. Carter had the right idea, but he was not re-elected, even though (or perhaps because) he said:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure. All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem. Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."
Instead, the USA chose the wrong path, and the Bush family and friends have made a bunch of money from oil profits in various ways, and many in the USA (and many in other countries) have suffered for decades due to this choice and similar ones year after year. Just like Germany took the wrong path in WWI and WWII, and Haber took the wrong path with creating poison gas then (and he also paid a personal price for it with the loss of his wife). Alternatives are possible. Although in Carter's case, it did not help that some other related policies he suggested were problematical.
Other recent posts by me on those themes:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
>people who, make no mistake, want to destroy our way of life.
Don't be melodramatic - for the most part they don't even know what our way of life is, except for the part that involves spending the better part of a century manipulating their domestic politics for our own ends - overthrowing legitimate democracies, installing sadistic dictators, selling them powerful weapons, etc. And honestly I'd rather like to destroy that part of our way of life myself, I just don't think it can be done via militant action.
For the most part they just want to drive out the foreign devils that are slaughtering civilians and raining death from above, whereas the warlords calling the shots probably secretly love having the foreign devils around giving them legitimacy and bolstering recruitment numbers to leverage in their domestic power struggles. Anything they know about our "way of life" is going to be the same sort of racist caricatures that pervaded US media during WWI and II - propaganda designed to dehumanize the enemy to bolster support for the domestic warmongers.
There is no doubt the occasional extremist who actually would like to destroy our way of life, but without a vast support structure they're just another random terrorist - maybe they manage to take out a few hundred people, maybe even a few thousand - tragic, but statistically insignificant - you chances of dieing in a car crash are much better. And if they do have the vast support structure, then it becomes a business, and like any institution its primary goal becomes self-perpetuation - not something usually furthered by picking fights with opponents that have you vastly outmatched. Though admittedly occasionally you get an Al Qaeda situation, where a crumbling institution deliberately provokes a dragon in order to give themselves a new patina of relevancy rather than fade gracefully into obscurity.
Meanwhile, virtually every "terrorist plot" interrupted in the last decade plus has been initiated by agent provocateurs working for the FBI, etc. *Maybe* you could argue that they're trying to "weed out the bad apples", but the available evidence looks a lot more like they're creating the very threat they're using to justify their ever-expanding authority.
Haber created a way to feed billions of people via nitrogen fertilizers(*), but then Haber supports a war based in large part on the idea there is not enough to go around and people need to steal each others land...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Sad to read Haber's first wife, who disapproved of Haber's poison gas work, committed suicide right after the first use of her husband's poison gas in war. Guess when something like that happens you either change or you embrace cognitive dissonance and dig in even further... See:
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes...
"Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception -- how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it."
(*) This is ignoring we now know ground-up rock dust and legumes etc. can do that too -- see: http://remineralize.org/ Also, excess nitrogen displaces other vital micronutrients which is why organic farming practices using things like slow-acting rock dust produce healthier plants and probably healthier people. See:
"Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach"
http://www.amazon.com/Towards-...
"This book explains the use of an ecological way of farming, with modern practical applications, to make the fullest use of land resources and the best utilization of available capital and labour. In analyzing the vital relationship between soil, plant, animal and man, the author discusses the best care of land itself, its components, grassland management and the most efficient use of crops to maximize yield, food quality and profitability without the extensive use of chemicals and without damaging the ecology. Widdowson also covers the holistic approach to animal farming, the welfare and health of poultry, cattle, sheep and goats, their nutritional needs through the various stages of their lives, and the best way to balance their diets."
That is why I feel the point in my sig is so essential for everyone to understand it the 21st century (although it has always been important, but gets increasingly important as our technology gets increasingly powerful): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
I guess it depends on how much everyone learns from history or example. Of course, it's been joked that those who study history are condemned to watch others repeat it...
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
Those changes to Germany came from the values of a 1930s/1940s USA.
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/2...
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
But, sadly, that USA and its values effectively no longer exist 70-80 years later. Today's USA has different values -- some are better (less racism and sexism overall, more respect for the environment), others are worse (less respect for workers, the "two-income trap", policies that promote a greater rich/poor divide, and more meddling in other nation's affairs which may produce profits for some connected few but produces huge costs for the whole USA let along the disrupted countries).
The real issue may be, like Gandhi is claimed to have said when asked by a journalist: "What do you think of Western civilization?", he said, "I think it would be a good idea."
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2...
At this point, as US citizen, I'm much more concerned about what the US government does both abroad and at home (including stuff like supporting a repressive Saudi Arabia, other actions abroad that make terrorist blowback more likely, domestic cage-like "free speech zones", domestic rulings saying border patrols can operate in a constitution-ignoring way up to 100 miles inland, etc.) -- than what people in the Middle East cradle of civilization do. And I remain always aware there are large numbers of nuclear weapons still ready to fly on short notice...
http://politics.slashdot.org/s...
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/2...
So, what will it take to civilize the USA? A basic income might be a start...
A Pete Seeger song, likewise covered by Peter, Paul and Mary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.metrolyrics.com/whe...
====
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone?
Gone for husbands everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the husbands gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the husbands gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the husbands gone?
Gone for soldiers everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
===
See also on the Bob Dylan backstory for "Blowing in the Wind": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://www.npr.org/2000/10/21/...
And for another part of that picture, from a US Major General Smedley Butler :
http://www.ratical.org/ratvill...
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
It won't solve the problem, no, but it's a start. And we *really* need to get people starting on a large scale. Short of someone pulling a cold-fusion reactor out of their nethers there won't be any magic bullets to this problem, and white roofs are cheap step we could take today, one that's absolutely cost effective anywhere that employs significant air conditioning: return on investment of *you* painting *your* roof white is probably a few years, tops. And done on a large scale in cities it would also reduce the heat island effect by at least several degrees, lowering cooling costs even further.
And all that lowered cost translates directly to lowered CO2 emissions. Not by much, but it's one of the few things that can be done without massive government intervention. And as people actually start taking a measure of personal responsibility for climate change, even if largely symbolic, then we can start to hope to gather the sort of popular momentum necessary for more sweeping changes. Or would you rather wait for the puppet masters to decide that business as usual is causing things to get bad enough even their obscene profits won't protect them? Because personally I don't think they're far-sighted enough to recognize that point, and even if they are, the rest of us will still be screwed.
Chemical weapons are ironic because any country capable of producing them like WWI Germany is capable of using chemistry instead of produce material abundance for the world. Instead, it is ironic and tragic when people decide to use such tools of abundance from a scarcity mindset, killing other humans out of fear of competition for material things (and so snuffing out much diverse human imagination which might eventually produce even more abundance). Other paths are possible; look at how much a modern day Germany produces mainly from within its own borders through using innovation and well-compensated laborers.
More on that theme by me: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
If there are clouds then the sunlight mostly wouldn't make it to ground level to begin with - on sunny days the reflected sunlight will mostly make it back out of the atmosphere, especially on roofs and other fairly horizontal surfaces. Whitewashing vertical surfaces is more relevant to cooling the individual structure, but a cooler structure is also one that likely runs less air conditioning, which until we get off fossil fuels will make an even bigger difference than whitewashing on solar thermal retention.
The problem is that at present we have lots of dark surfaces absorbing that sunlight and re-emitting it as thermal infrared - most of which gets reflected even by clear skies.
As an example, and with its own problems, the Raspberry Pi has proved "good enough" for a lot of embedded companies, who just accept various tradeoffs to code in Python (or whatever) under Linux. In ten years, such hardware will be even cheaper and even better, and may have even better RTOS support:
http://pebblebay.com/raspberry...
Likewise and even more so for the truly free and open source Beagleboard family:
http://beagleboard.org/
What a far cry from the Kim-1 with 1K of memory I bought as a kid (with my father's help) for probably 50X in current dollars what a Rapsberry Pi or Beagleboard costs and supplies about 1GB memory. We even had to build the power supply ourselves.
This is not to disagree with what you are saying right now. I know how hard and important all that work can be. But if better tools eventually let fewer engineers produce more projects in the same time, and cheaper hardware means less constraints, and other standards change expectations so customers know to work within them, than the need for managing such complexity (including the human side) may go down. Granted with a rising increase in an internet of things and robotics, embedded work may well still increase in demand for a decade or two until better standards come to dominate the field and change the nature of so many embedded tasks. So, for anyone already well enmeshed int he embedded field, it may well be a good gig for the next decade or two.
Anyway, for fun, to go through your list (a bit tongue in cheek, so not completely serous answers):
"First of all the robot would have to sit in meetings with the customer understanding what the customer wants, telling him what can't be done and outlining alternative solutions in dumbed down language the customer understands. It should tell the customer if some of his choices will raise the cost (Yes, in theory the hardware can do X but the current drivers can't)."
This can be replaced in part by a web interface where the customer clicks on options and the software tells them if the combination is allowed.
"It would have to write an offer listing everything that the customer wants to have implemented but worded so he can't expect more for his money. It has to be worded so that sales people and management understand enough to agree to the price written at the bottom."
Again, web backend generates this based on web interface choices.
"It needs to understand all documentation provided by the customer and it needs to be able to find more. It also needs to know who it can ask for an undocumented detail. Currently documentation includes data sheets, Doxygen like API descriptions, articles, standards, schematics, forum discussions, RCS commit messages, source code, and books but there will probably be a new form designed to be understood by machines. It is also useful to remember everything the customer said even if it might turn out to be wrong."
This could be mostly replaced by machine-readable standards as you suggest.
"It has to know sources of errors. Documentation can have errors. There can be errors in the design of the hardware. The hardware might be faulty (f.ex. bad solder joints) and you need to know what will destroy the hardware (no you can't configure that GPIO to output a low value). It has to fix simple errors itself (yes, I did have to solder some jumper wires and pull up resistors in the past few years). If it can't fix the error, it has to discuss the problem with someone who can. If the problem won't be fixed (no we won't spin a new SoC revision for you) software workarounds have to be devised and the pros and cons have to be discussed with the customer. To be able to find errors, it has to know about software and hardware debugging techniques (printf debugging, Gdb, Valgrind, JTAG, oscilloscope probing,
Bad hardware becomes so cheap it is discarded. Twenty years ago OTI had embedded Smalltalk development tools that could make such debugging much easier. See:
http://www.slideshare.net/esug...
"It has to write code in a form that can be maintained. It has to merge code (complete components and updates thereof) from suppliers and know what has to be changed to make it work again. Our suppliers often don't know they are supplying to us, so is has to have an eye on their release and security announcements. It has to decide if an update is advised and then has to inform the customers (if they signed a support contract)."
Again, Smalltalk was the answer. It might be yet again someday.
"It has to come up with software tests. Some customers explicitly want unit tests or detailed test reports. It has to do the tests that have been paid for. Of course the minimum testing is determined by what makes you feel confident that it works."
Yeah testing can be hard. But that's what unpaid exploitable interns trying to break into the industry so they won't starve are for.
http://theintern.io/
"It has to write documentation. Test reports, end user documentation, API descriptions."
The new standard is that the need for documentation is an error that needs to be routed around.
"It has to communicate with the customer to ask for things that have to be provided (We need a cable for your special connector on port X. When can we expect the display PCB to be done?), to learn about bugs and to announce releases. Doing so it has to be polite. It must be pleasant for the customer to communicate with the robot."
This is all handled by an Amazon-like web site.
"It has to meet with the customer for an integration workshop (Our first board revision will be assembled on Thursday. Can you come on Friday to make the software work? Yes, we know it did work on the evaluation board.) or to analyze bugs on size (Our factory stops working about a handful of times a day. No we can't send it to you and we won't connect it to the internet for debugging.)."
The web site is always available. The hardware downloads the updates itself wirelessly using some standard protocol.
"There is probably still something I forgot. In my opinion it would be inefficient to split all this between humans an robots. How would a human know what is possible if it doesn't do the coding? Given all that, I think my job is safe until machines are intelligent enough to rule the world."
Better tools will help fewer engineers do more. But I agree embedded engineering is one of the most important jobs in our society right now and the need will grow. However, in the same way engineers rarely solder individual transistors into logic circuits theses days, in the future, engineers may be working with large building blocks and better tools for integrating them. That also could just printing out a perfect (and self-testing) design based on simulation tests using standard building blocks. It is when we push the edges of things that we have the most issues to handle. As hardware and standards improve, the edges may get farther and farther away.
I agree software now is a mess. I program in JavaScript for deployability, but it too is a mess, and much harder to work with than Smalltalk or even Java or Clipper. HyperCard was another great system for its time. Greed harmed several of these languages, Smalltalk and HyperCard especially, but even Java by keeping it proprietary for so long.
Ironically, compared to the article's suggestion, it seems the more code we have, the more programmers we need to keep up with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."
As I see it though, we probably have about 99X+ more programmers than we need already, as far as core infrastructure.
Much of what programmers do in practice is (perhaps unintentionally) make work for each other. It may well be worse than the legal profession in that sense (where lawyers make work for each other or create or encourage conflicts). A lot of that comes from the nature of capitalism and competition vs. alternative economic forms based more on cooperation. Programmers typically can't freely share code or specs with others in different businesses, so everyone is always re-inventing the wheel and reverse engineering data structures and data formats and communications protocols, which create a proliferation of slightly different code bases with different edge cases.
For another example, why do we really need so many web browser engines? Also, why could not some web standards body accept Sqlite as the defacto web browser data storage engine because there were not "multiple implementations"? A shared public codebase is often the best standard. Like Alan Kay says, any textual standard of more than five lines is ambiguous. On that Sqlite issue, see:
http://diveintohtml5.info/stor...
"All of which brings us to the following disclaimer, currently residing at the top of the Web SQL Database specification: "This specification has reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path. Until another implementor is interested in implementing this spec, the description of the SQL dialect has been left as simply a reference to Sqlite, which isn't acceptable for a standard. ""
Instead of that well engineered Sqlite library, we now get a half-baked "IndexedDB" standard as Firefox refuses to support Web SQL as Sqlite even though Sqlite is already baked into the Firefox browser!
http://programmers.stackexchan...
"Short version: Web SQL was deprecated because standards are really important and turning Web SQL into a proper standard would have been prohibitively difficult.
Mozilla's blog gives more details on their reasoning in particular for not supporting Web SQL; apparently they were one of the major voices in getting Web SQL deprecated.
Should you go with Web SQL now? I don't expect the vendors that currently support it (like Google and Apple) to drop it any time soon, but IE and Firefox won't be adding it, and since it's deprecated, why invest in it? (For example, Ido Green, with Google Developer Relations, doesn't recommend using it.)"
Mozilla helped kill it! So now the web browser struggles to be a real personal development platform with well-defined efficient indexable local data storage (even though such code is already built in to almost all of them).
Still, programmers generally like writing new code. It can be fun. I would no sooner stop people from doing that than I would stop them from composing poetry or writing essays or painting pictures or talking to neighbors or cooking delicious meals or gardening in their backyards. As an example, I feel new experiments like the "Smallest Federated Wiki" are very much worth coding up:
http://fed.wiki.org/trending.h...
But in a business, every line of code in some sense becomes a debt that must be maintained ("technical debt"). The code you wrote yesterday is today's legacy code maintenance problem. Perhaps we need better tools to prioritize what legacy code most needs to be maintained?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Technical debt (also known as design debt[1] or code debt) is a recent metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor system design, software architecture or software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete or proper. If the debt is not repaid, then it will keep on accumulating interest, making it hard to implement changes later on. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy. As a change is started on a codebase, there is often the need to make other coordinated changes at the same time in other parts of the codebase or documentation. The other required, but uncompleted changes, are considered debt that must be paid at some point in the future. Just like financial debt, these uncompleted changes incur interest on top of interest, making it cumbersome to build a project. Although the term is used in software development primarily, it can also be applied to other professions."
And, as a scary thought, some theories of social collapse suggest civilizations fail when the cost of maintaining the growing infrastructure exceeds the returns produced by that infrastructure. Could we be reaching that point with software?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Tainter's position is that social complexity is a recent and comparatively anomalous occurrence requiring constant support. He asserts that collapse is best understood by grasping four axioms. In his own words (p. 194):
human societies are problem-solving organizations;
sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;
increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and
investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response reaches a point of declining marginal returns.
With these facts in mind, collapse can simply be understood as a loss of the energy needed to maintain social complexity. Collapse is thus the sudden loss of social complexity, stratification, internal and external communication and exchange, and productivity."
I've worked towards simpler tools in a variety of ways (most recently trying to make the most of JavaScript as a defacto standard even with its problems), but of course, in some other ways my additional coding only adds to the problem of more competing "standards" and yet more legacy code...
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Pointre...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://xkcd.com/927/
Linked below are some further economic rambles by me on what to do when more people finally realize all this and more, especially if systems including mainstream economics start to collapse in unexpected ways (like as mainstream economics hits divide-by-zero errors due to plummeting costs or wages):
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."
...Fool me twice, shame on...uhhhh...we won't get fooled again.
What motivates people is autonomy, increasing mastery, and a sense of purpose. See Dan Pink's talk:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Or look at the writing of Alfie Kohn:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/punis...
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
" "We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."
Progress or "advancement" in what direction is another good question to ask yourself. Is it a good idea to more quickly advance off a cliff? For example, the World Wide Web might have been a much better place and the web browser might have been a much better tool if not for all the effort various groups have put into undermining web standards for private gain (for example, Microsoft in the early years). The problem with a lot of competition is it encourages people to use power (including political power) to private gains while socializing costs, and that can be very costly and unpleasant overall for a community. Once can have *diversity* without explicit *competition*. What it takes is something like a basic income, easy subsistence production, free-or-cheap-to-the-user planned infrastructure, or some other means of ensuring people have the time and resources to create.
If our culture was as aggressive as the Romans, maybe the Earth would be a nuclear wasteland by now? Although, as "I, Claudius" suggests, a lot of Roman aggression was turned in on itself at some point, with political murders including of the leaders who might otherwise have made Rome a better place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"During the prosperous reign of Augustus, he is plagued by personal losses as his favored heirs, Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa, Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar, die at varying points. Claudius reveals that these untimely deaths are all the machinations of Augustus' cold wife Livia, who seeks to make her son Tiberius succeed Augustus.
If we did not have weapons based on the tools of abundance like nuclear bombs as a result of harnessing abundant nuclear energy, aggression out-of-control would not be such a big global issue and threat (even if aggression could always be a local issue). Ironically, harnessing nuclear power and other forms of advanced technology that could produce abundance (including abundant destruction) like robots and new materials has removed the reasons for much aggression over material goods, but we still are stuck in our old mindset emphasizing aggression as a way to deal with material scarcity. So, for example, we are ready to use nuclear energy in the form of nuclear weapons delivered by robotic cruise missiles whose batteries were charged by solar panels to fight over oil fields on the other side of the planet from us -- instead of using nuclear energy (or robot-constructed solar panels or whatever) to generate power locally. Image what the 21st century could have been like without two Word Wars if 1910s and 1930s Germany had worked towards breakthroughs in solar power and energy efficiency and agricultural efficiency instead of trying to steal someone else's coal and land. Now Germany focuses inward on innovation and efficiency and is peaceful and the economic powerhouse of the European Union.
I wrote about this broad issue at length here:
"Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)"
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
That's the big issue as I mention in my sig, and it plays out in other ways including with food, media, addiction, and so on as human traits adapted evolutionarily for scarcity cause difficulties when confronted with some sorts of modern abundance.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
http://www.nancycarlssonpaige....
http://dianeelevin.com/sosexys...
All that said, cooperation within groups has also been a key trait of human beings.
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
But it is true that humans tend to have in group cooperation and out-group competition, something E.O. Wilson has written about. And human mating rituals also often revolve around proving something to stand out from the crowd, like James P. Hogan touches on in "Voyage From Yesteryear" depicting a culture where people compete by demonstrating excellence in some area. So, again, the biggest issue is not aggression or competition itself, but how those impulses are culturally directed. As. Mr. Fred Rogers' sang: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" That is the question.
BTW, bacteria are actually the dominant species on this planet,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Now, if the world's bacteria would just give us a little more help in making self-replicating space habitats that could duplicate themselves form sunlight and asteroidal ore (including helping create the information tools to design them), we could increase their biomass in the solar system by a factor of 1000X or more.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Try this: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/P...
You can enter the below short JavaScript script in the text box, and then push the "View Below" button to create a new div for the window which will pop up the alert as part of displaying itself.
<script>
alert("hello");
</script>
If you enter a Data ID for the text and a User ID for yourself (can be almost anything) and click "Store" you will store that text in the web browser's local storage.
I wrote that about a year ago. It works under Firefox on Mac OS 10.6. It may not work as well elsewhere; for example Firefox under Win7 didn't work for some reasons when I tried it yesterday (but probably a minor error to fix). I do not know how it will perform on most mobile systems, but again, in theory, it should work or otherwise be relatively easy to fix. Here is the source code with more information:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
You can also enter any HTML you want there, like to create buttons or divs or anything you want. Examples can be loaded by imported the text below into the editor using "Import and Merge" and then you can click "List all IDs" and select an item like "polar clock" to view it below (that example is a graphical clock, written by someone else using D3):
https://raw.githubusercontent....
A different approach to doing something like that if you are willing to host a NodeJS server somewhere is this other code I wrote:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
However, if you go that route, there are quite a few web services that support remote coding through the browser on hosted platforms. For example, "Cloud 9":
https://c9.io/
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
