Thanks! I've been seeding my sig across the web for almost twenty years in hopes it would eventually become part of AI training data -- hoping that future AIs would appreciate the irony outlined it and make decisions informed by that insight (even if most humans might not). It would be very gratifying to know I succeeded! :-)

"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."

Indeed, yes that is the core issue! Although, if we look at history, like in the book "The Dawn of Everything", for thousands of years humans have lived in a variety of ways, so alternatives are possible.

Dawn on Everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The "Dictionary of Alternatives" lists both historical and imagined possibilities for social organization: https://archive.org/details/di...

Mike Kashtan person writing stories on envisioning a socially healthier future:
https://nglcommunity.org/about...
"Miki Kashtan is a practical visionary pursuing a world that works for all, exploring the application of the principles and tools of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to social transformation. She dreams of local and global systems based on care for the needs of all life. In her work with individuals, she focuses on supporting movement towards rapid empowerment in service of the whole. In her work with organizations, she focuses on creating and supporting collaborative systems and processes. In her work with multi-stakeholder groups, she focuses on transcending polarization and advocating for solutions that work for everyone. Inner freedom, nonviolence, dialogue, collaboration, interdependence, leadership, conscious use of power, and a commitment to structural change are the lenses through which she looks at every moment and interaction. Some of her deepest sources of inspiration are many feminist theoreticians, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Marshall Rosenberg, Mary Parker Follett, radical economics, and the commons movement. Miki strives to bring together theory and practice, spiritual commitment and conceptual clarity, radical vision and practical applications, heart and mind, self and other, personal change and social transformation."

James P. Hogan in his 1982 sci-fi book "Voyage from Yesteryear" and some other books illustrates a conflict between scarcity-thinking and post-scarcity-thinking.

Also: https://www.aeinstein.org/
"The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) is a nonprofit organization founded by Dr. Gene Sharp in 1983 to advance the study and use of strategic nonviolent action in conflict. For over 40 years, we have been committed to the defense of freedom, democracy and the reduction of political violence through the use of nonviolent action. Our goals are to understand the dynamics of nonviolent action in conflicts, explore its policy potential, and communicate this through publications and other multimedia resources, consultations, and educational workshops."

Or something I just saw today:
https://dictionaryofradicalalt...
"This platform aims to share worldviews and practices around alternatives processes in a collaborative way."

The same thing is to true for maintaining physical and mental health in our modern world, where organizations caqn exploit our natural preferences tuned toward scarcity to control us using manufactured ultraprocessed abundance not designed for maximizing health.

"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness"
https://www.healthpromoting.co...

Similar: "The Pleasure Trap: Dopamine Nation Explains Why We Feel So Empty; In the age of infinite abundance, we are somehow running on empty.
https://danielyeepsych.substac...

More general:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

The Dawn of Everything describes a time some thousands of years ago where walls started going up around cities and kings appeared. One take on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"McNeill also makes a broader comparison of civilization [or militarism?] to disease, as a "macroparasite" that weakens societies but also confers political and bureaucratic protection as endemic diseases can confer protection against severe outbreaks of infection."

As I see it, there were "pre-scarcity" times, and then "scarcity" times (the last few thousand years as populations grew in excess of technological capacity) and now we have the e potential for "post-scarcity" times -- but only if we don't squander all that abundance (like Bucky Fuller warned about).

So, another way is possible. But as you imply, it takes a lot of (social) work, and it is a constant struggle (like the perennial fight against mildew in a home in a damp climate). We could use robots to help in that struggle, or we could ironically use robots to spread more "mildew" (mil-do?).

By me from 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
      "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ...
        There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."

Or as I summarize in my sig: "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."

This is "victory" because the Dems like the environment, so stopping anyone from knowing about it is ergo "beating the Dems".

Same reason the Republicans were all about demolishing the ACA (an act written by a Republican and then edited by Republicans because the Democrat proposals weren't acceptable to them). The ACA was voted on by Dems and therefore had to be destroyed, the fact that it has led to many Americans being without any healthcare at all and more than a few dying as a result is considered an acceptable price to pay for killing something Democrats voted for.

"Victory" is not about doing anything worthwhile, it's about "owning the Dems".

Of course they colluded with foreign powers. However, it's irrelevant. Since the legalisation of corruption (Trump abolished any enforcement of corruption laws), the US has slid from an already disastrous level of corruption into total degeneracy. It will take years, maybe decades, simply to root out all of the evil that is now in place and by then those who committed treason will either be safely overseas, or their records will have been "accidentally" destroyed, making any investigation impossible.

I would point out, though, that the countries the GOP has historically strong ties with also have extraordinarily high levels of corruption - and have done for a long time - and nobody bothers to do anything about it. This is what Trump is relying on. Once corruption at this level is normalised, everyone just accepts it and moves on.

Worse, I just don't see any serious will to fix the issue amongst any of the other political groups in the US. The Democrats aren't being honest with themselves over why they lost in 2024, and have swung so far to the right themselves that Ronald Reagan would have considered them right-wing extremists.

This is something voters can fix, but almost half of Americans have totally disengaged at this point and the other half believes themselves so powerless that (to use a Douglas Adamsism) they're only concerned with preventing the wrong lizard from being elected.

Meanwhile, X.AI has asked the EPA for permission to release up to 100 million hyperfecund pesticide-resistant male mosquitoes in California and New York over two years to own the libs.

Is anyone, *anyone* surprised? Step 1: Depend on MS. Step 2: Get screwed. That's the process.

Me from 2000: https://dougengelbart.org/coll...
        "Powertech -- Twenty years to widespread fuel cells, PV, wind, microturbines, etc.
  Source: My general reading in this area, like my previous post on energy issues. ..."

The referenced energy post by me from 2000: https://dougengelbart.org/coll...
        "The current land area used in the US related to fossil fuel mining, refining, storage, and distribution is roughly 1% of the US land area. So, it is not fair to say renewables would use a similarly large amount of area and disregard this amount of space used by conventional techniques. For example, the area under existing power lines in the US (for right of ways - a huge expanse) is sufficient to generate all electric power used in the US if it was covered with photovoltaics. ... Recent advances in photovoltaics (especially combining light collection of visible spectrum piped to interiors with power conversion of remaining wavelengths) may soon make them much more competitive. ...
        There are no easy answers, but remember the incredible number of people who use energy (all of us) and the large numbers of people who are already involved with the energy industry in some way. So, there are many people to implement solutions. Don't be too overwhelmed by large numbers and costs. If fossil fuel and nuclear solutions were fairly priced today in terms of external costs like tax subsidies, environmental damage, and military requirements, we would see an immediate switch to alternatives and more energy efficient technology.
          For that reason, I am quite hopeful for our energy future -- especially if developing countries can be given advanced technology, rather than having them simply duplicate the current antiquated American fossil fuel infrastructure. Unfortunately, the politics and finances of development often entail developing nations being sold the technology that no one wants anymore in the developed world (like for example DDT or old nuclear reactor and dam designs).
        We need to figure out ways to prevent that from happening with energy technology the same way it has happened in the past with other technologies. ..."

Me from 2010: https://groups.google.com/g/op...
        "As I've said before, if you look at the exponential growth of renewables, in twenty to thirty years we will be completely running off renewables. This [questionable "Net Energy Limits and the Fate of Industrial Society"] report is like a report in the 1980s saying there is no way that most people will own cell phones because only about a million people a year are buying cell phones and it would take seven thousand years for everyone to get a cell phone at that rate. But now half the Earth's population does have cell phones? What happened? Exponential growth."

Ray Kurzweil also predicted exponential solar growth back in 2000 or so.

So yeah, who would have thunk it?

I mean, it's not like there might have been financial incentives for industry groups to provide misleading predictions, right?
"Why Does the IEA Always Underestimate Solar Energy's Rapid Growth?"
https://247wallst.com/energy/2...
        "Using data from the agency's World Economic Outlook (WEO) for 13 of the past 16 years, Hoekstra graphed the actual growth of solar PV installation (the thick black line on the following chart) against the IEA predictions from the WEO. The starting point for each year's new prediction moves higher and in some years sharply higher. Hoekstra notes that "every single time since the future of photovoltaics was first predicted in the IEA WEO in 2002, the WEO has assumed the sector would hardly grow or even contract, even though this runs contrary to the observed reality."
        Because the IEA's WEO is a widely used source for policy makers around the world, consistently underestimating the growth of solar PV when the data say otherwise discourages investment in solar and can hold back even faster growth. ...
        Hoekstra, in a blog post last June, offers some possible explanations for the IEA's low and inaccurate predictions: ... The IEA could have been captured by the old fossil energy order in terms of thinking or interests. This could be conscious or unconscious. I would guess largely unconscious because I'm a firm believer in Hanlon's razor. ..."

*head bangs in approval*

Oh, forgot to link the dry density for you: here you go. 341kcal/100g. Aka 3,41kcal/g.

Which, like I said, should be obvious, since they're almost entirely carbs (~4kcal/g) and protein (~4kcal/g), and they're, as noted, dry (12-16% moisture). It would be quite the trick indeed to get something that is dry and and is almost entirely comprised of things that are 4kcal/g to be 1,38kcal/g! ;)

Just in case you need help:

Your calculation: 195g (dry weight) × 1.38 kcal/g = 269 calories per pound of cooked beans.
Correction: Because you used 1.38 kcal/g (the cooked density) as if it were the dry density, you essentially diluted the calories twice.
The Actual Math: 195g of dry beans * 3.4 kcal/g (actual dry density) = 663 kcal.

When those 195g of dry beans absorb water to weigh 454g (1 pound), they still contain those same 663 calories (since water has zero calories).

Canned beans are ALREADY COOKED. *facepalm*. You can eat them straight out of the can.

which is waaaay more than I would want to eat at a sitting.

I can't think of a single ingredient - any ingredient - that I would want to eat exclusively as my diet, so this is a really stupid argument.

In general, "damping pleasure" is not most people's experience with GLP-1 agonists. What it does is more like separate pleasurable experiences from having an urgent need to continue doing them.

I'd believe the Iceland numbers. I had a doctor once who wanted to get me on antidepressants, and got mad when I didn't want to, and completely ignored my pleadings of "But I'm not depressed", "I enjoy life", "I'm probably the least depressed person you'll meet", etc. He just really liked his patients to be on it. The Icelandic medical system is very into anything that "medicates symptoms" rather than treating diseases. For example, during COVID, it was essentially impossible to get drugs like paxlovid, but they made parkodín (tylenol with codeine) over-the-counter.

In most modern societies medication is usually a last resort.

I'm going to take a wager that if I were to open your medicine cabinet right now, there would be painkillers in it, which you take as will when you get headaches, body aches, etc.

Yes, different people have different baseline hunger levels. This is well accepted in the scientific community.