One wonders, though, if this awakening will be about anything more than just more anti "T" man, or simply more tired reforms; reforms that even the Democratic Party is having a hard time selling itself on any more. And trying to do both, I think, wouldn't be much better.
I have to say in this, from the tech side of things, it has always been a huge disappointment for me that not more of the tech sector hasn't at least asked the same questions I've been asking for quite a while now. I could certainly understand the questions being asked, mind you, and smarter folks than me coming up with better answers. That, in fact, would be a huge relief.... Because this is seriously not something you take up for the sheer, glorious fun of it. And now that I'm closer to 70 than I was to 60, I could use a lot more "sheer, glorious fun" than I'm getting now, I can assure you.
Anyways... It has been a disappointment; especially as it was Marshall McLuhan who got me started down this path.
I mean, come on! That guy is supposed to be Wired's patron saint for Christs sakes. And if you were into the guy, it's hard for me to see how you couldn't see the trifecta of social, political, and economic implications in the interplay of his ideas. And don't even get me started on how the rest of tech missed the whole "Capitalism is just another complicated operating system" argument! Honestly. Who in tech doesn't understand the lifetime limits of operating systems? Would you still be running original Windows if you did?
Well... The past is the past, as they say. Time to concentrate on looking forward, right? And in doing that we have to ask those questions I've been asking: Can Capitalism continue in an electrified information environment (assuming we still value Democracy, and the rule of law)? Can Capitalism get around the re-evaluation of what work has become? Can wage work possibly remain a viable human commodity? Wasn't Capitalism, in large part, the result of the mind set brought about by "repeatable type?" If it was, and we have social organization by the factory mindset, don't the sense modalities brought on by a, now, oral type culture demand that we move away from the segmented, linear, and overly rational, mentality that came with repeatable type? Doesn't a great deal of the supposed inevitability of the onset of AI; the AI that is supposed to replace us; come from the obvious competitive economics that such machines give an edge to?
That's what I get off the top of my head right now. There's probably more, but hell, I'm only on my second cup of coffee this morning, and my memory is certainly not what it used to be. Be that as it may, however, those are just some of the things the tech crowd needs to be asking itself, now that it's taking its, figurative, first cup a joe on waking up. Time will tell I guess.
His patsy in the White house had his, soon to be installed, National Security advisor tell the Russians not to worry. These sanctions would be "revisited," so to speak, and Putin would get his money's worth for helping with the election.
No big surprise certainly. Just par for the course as far as the new administration is concerned. You do have to wonder, though, if Putin is worried at all on whether his guy in the White House can stop focusing on judges, who have the nerve to remind him of how our laws work, or on bad mouthing a department stores that won't continue selling stuff his staff is endorsing for his family. Is he ever going to get back around to actually paying off on this debt? Lip service is one thing, but the check can only be in the mail for so long. If Putin starts getting antsy do you think we can expect some interesting leeks to come unexpected sources?
Isn't this just so much better now that we have a "Reality TV" show actually in the White House? So entertaining.
With some very creative engineering the Japanese nearly pulled off an extension of a method of attack that would have been unsettling, to say the least; most assuredly if they'd have been able to attack major West, and East, coast cities.
The idea was called the I-400 and was the brainchild of none other than Admiral Yamamoto himself. The design ended up being essentially two very large sub hulls merged so that hangar space to accommodate three new attack aircraft could be carried, along with the usual sail section. And he wanted to build something like eighteen of the new class of sub carriers. With five carriers, say, in an attack group, you'd have ended up with 15 aircraft; something about equal to an actual air squadron in our terms. Nothing like B-17's over Germany to be sure, but still.
Just consider it. Pop up somewhere, drop your 15 thousand pounders, fly back and then disappear to do it all over again. Back in those days it would have been very impressive, both psychologically for the population, but also logistically, as our forces would have had to shift significantly in order to patrol for attacks not that easy to see coming.
It reminds me to wonder if our planners are giving enough consideration to a better variation of this sort of thing. Say a submersible, drone attack, aircraft carrier; with the carrier itself being a drone as well. The Navy has been trying out a pretty slick looking drone now on existing carriers and it sure does suggest where things are probably gonna be going anyway.
Don't get me wrong, though. Existing carriers are still pretty cool, and a real testament to the ingenuity of the Navy to design, and operate, such massively complex combinations of both people, and technical, systems. Most especially as it relates to the training that the Navy has brought itself up to be able to do. Damn near astounding when you realize that they take kids off of the streets, almost literally, and teach them to run these self propelled, armed cities. It's the kind of thing that gives me faith in the idea that, if we were to attempt to implement the alternative I have outlined, most of us could be trained to run our own cities as well.
Just something to think about.
The Largest Submarine in World War II ( World War 2 Documentary )
As if you needed to be reminded, some amazing things are happening the world of materials science. Graphene in and of itself of course, thought the work there is still slower than desired because of difficulties in manufacturing it in quantity with its sheet form, but with the foam approach a limit to production capability isn't nearly as much of a factor.
As you can see in the linked video below a piece of foam, something perhaps a bit less than an inch square, is holding up under nearly a ton of tensile load. Doesn't take a genius here to see that such foam could be a real boon to much easier construction techniques.
Even on the face of news of this sort it's easy to say "that's great," no matter of other considerations. A plus all the way around.
Wouldn't it be better, though, if we could utilize such discoveries without any fear whatsoever as to the jobs it might eliminate (however few, or many that may be)? Wouldn't it be great if, in the context of an alternative like mine, you were a member of a community set up as I have described them (see here, here, or here). And let's say that you had accumulated both the materials requirements (in you participation of community upkeep), as well as the service time on the various community maintained machines needed, to build an amazingly cool, new free style home? Or maybe you only needed to add a workshop to an existing home.
You may have already made use of the surveying bot of course, or done it yourself (the videos online to show how are pretty good for that). Laser referencing posts would have been placed. The underlying utilities pipes and wires as well. All that would be left is for the structure printer to roll up on its tracks, you making sure the cad design you imputed was recognized, and initialized, and you would be on your way.
Just something to think about when you find yourself worrying about what's to become of your current job. Or what kinds of pay sacrifice you'll be asked to make again to keep the job you have now... You know... The one that barely allows you to make ends meet as it is?
...As opposed to a cultural left, now that populism has been turned on its head by "alternative facts" branding?
I ask this question as it relates to the very interesting article in Vox about Richard Rorty (linked below).
That he seems to have predicted the coming of an authoritarian strongman has put this philosopher into some new found notice in the infosphere of late. The quote of note is as follows:
"Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers – themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots."
What Mr. Rorty was concerned about was that the left went from being reform minded, during the period of the early 1900's to the sixties, to being primarily culturally oriented; which is to say they went from concerns of primarily economic equity to those of the inequities of certain social attitudes, as in race and gender relations, to name a few. And he felt this was a big mistake, even though the latter issues were of significant moral importance.
The article's author does make it clear that this is something of a simplistic distinction, especially given how one side things here overlaps into the other, but there is still an important point to be made here.
What we are looking at here may well be a big part of the substantive foundation that made reformist Liberals what they still are today, and why they still cling to the idea that the economic system can be reformed by practical minded people. And in that reform lies the best hope for "Achieving Our Country."
The problem for me in this, recognizing that, in the beginning of Capitalism's great movement of material gain across the globe (actual gain for a lot of people, but attained at a terrible costs), effective reform was still possible. And more to the point, was achievable and did a lot of what it was supposed to do. But in that success was also the seeds for a growing sense that reform was the only alternative.
The problem here is that both Capitalism, and the environment in which it operates, changed in ways hardly anyone could have anticipated with the advent of both electrified experience retrieval, and the onset of globalized commerce writ large. Not only has the former changed the nature of work (putting into great question its validity as a human born commodity), but it also made the globalization much more dynamic than it could have possibly been otherwise. The kind of dynamics that put not only competition into turbo electric overdrive, it made shifting production to where ever vastly more practical than it has ever been since. As such what we have now is a mutated version of the Capitalism once envisioned by Adam Smith. A system so much more complicated, and which now works at the inhuman speeds of processors doing billions of operations a second. Thousands upon thousands of processors doing billions of operations a second.
Trying to reform this sort of complex system is now a fool's errand of the highest degree. It's like trying to put improvements into a piece of software that, starting out at millions of lines of code, and then having a decade or more of changes made to it, now presents the problem that any further efforts to introduce further changes only serves to create more problems than what was initially intended to be fixed in the first place.
So now you have that problem, as well as the problem that this particular economic operating system simply cannot handle equitable distribution of outputs. Perhaps even worse than that, however, is that is also cannot properly handle the creation of meaningful priorities for virtually any level of government. A quite lethal problem now that the world has become so desperately complex in the new swirl of increased market competitions, depleting recourse competitions, and a planet that will no longer allow us to kick true costs down the road any longer.
And if all of that weren't bad enough, you have one more issue that is a real kick in the ass all by itself: The fact that information, now a commodity of the first rank, is played with by every side against the middle; which used to be an ability to reach a consensus on what is the current social reality. A consensus that has never been easy to achieve at any time given that power has always had an ability to fuck with it, but now far worse when even a few folks with some compromised servers can dick with it in comparative ease.
The left has to come to understand this. The sooner the better. Anyone who would champion populist politics has to understand this. The sooner the better. The fact of the matter is that true reform now has to be a new alternative that blends a better balance between Libertarianism, and Socialism, which, poor though my efforts may have been so far, is what I have been trying to do for the last fifteen or so years (part time for most of that, but full time now that I'm retired). And when you think about it, why shouldn't social and economic reform be led by a reluctantly bred systems analyst?
...Or the acronym SMI2LE, which was coined by none other than Timothy Leary, which stands for "Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension; the problem with these is that they are dreams of a "New Utopia" fueled by several different drugs of choice, only one of which is psychedelics.
It pains me deeply that space exploration, or human improvement itself, for that matter, became a pseudo, mystical-religious, attempt to transcend in one way or another. That as opposed to a simple understanding that there are not only too many of us on the planet, but that the other drugs of choice got the planet well on the way to being screwed up long before the population numbers started becoming quite unmanageable.
Or that we could improve ourselves quite handily if we were no longer shackled by the constant economics of scarcity; even as the captains of tech and capital become awash in excess that staggers the mind. But then, that nexus represents the other drugs I've already mentioned; those heady amounts of wealth, and/or the status of genius being granted on techno applicators; applicators who were in the right place at the right time when Capitalism's already insane penchant for competition started getting accelerated by science on a number of fronts.
And now that Capitalism has jumped into the turbo-electric, loop accelerator, turning ever faster trying to find, and then exploit, the next "disruptive" advantage, making application an absolute necessity, whether it's a good idea or not, or whether the long term implications have even been imagined yet, or not, let alone prepared for. Now that we're here, in this insane acceleration, and we've made a mess of things on the planet, and a significant number of techno-luminaries think the next big singularity is machine intelligence taking over, because we have run our evolutionary course and there's just nothing left here that we are capable of understanding any more. Unless we use this madness machine to run away to other planets, or the right drugs, in a conventional sense, to drop out and not care anymore.
What crap. What unmitigated crap.
Don't get me wrong. It's hard not to be impressed by the likes of Musk, Leary, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, or even Ken Kesey who, with the bus further and the pranksters (read the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolf), probably did at least as much to promote psychedelic drugs, if not more, than Leary ever did. Guys like this are, and were, impressive minds that took an idea, or an experience, quite a bit too far. And it's indeed unfortunate, especially in the case of psychedelic drugs because they can have tremendous benefit if used as something other than just party favors. But then, the same could be said for technological development as well.
What guys like Musk and Theil don't understand is that the very markets they've "disrupted" and made billions on is a fickle mistress of fate, even when she isn't already messed up on her own drug mix of electrified new technologies. The money they have to start their grand schemes is at their beck and call now, and they are still the darlings of the market, but what of tomorrow? I had a retirement fund going, as well as a very nice chunk of land in Eastern Washington, I was counting on. That is until the great depression wasted the fund, and left me with land I had to sell at a loss because I no longer had the bucks to make it liveable, now that I am retired. Something I think a lot of people in this country can relate to back when Obama first took office.
And even if we were to get off planet in the way that Musk would like, what would follow in our wake? Now that covetous eyes are looking at all of the mineral wealth that's undoubtedly out there. Will we end up with a combination of scenarios that combines ultimate gated communities like "Elysium" with the economics, and class strife suggested in the series "The Expanse?" If that's the case then why not just drop out and let the robots take over.
The problem. The central problem is that the current economic operating system is no longer up to the task of doing what humanity needs to do, when it needs to do it. It is now, in fact, an out of control, science, and social engineering, experiment that must be turned off, and then scraped. We must take what we can then recycle from it and build something that makes actual human sense, as opposed to profit sense, or development sense. Getting off the planet eventually is just a part of that.
I thought that Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz doing a debate on the Affordable Care Act was as reasonable of an incentive as any to talk about how my alternative to Capitalism might handle this sort of thing.
It is especially important here because it speaks to one aspect of the alternative that is important to make clear on.
I am, essentially, trying to move from a specialist based economy to one that is, well, something less than that.
I am circumspect in that statement for a reason. And to explain that I need to start from this supposition: My intent here is not to do away with specialization. Such a thing would not only be very impractical, it would tend to go against something intrinsic in, at least, a good portion of us; that tendency, or desire, to focus on being really good at something in particular; something that resonates with a special passion.
My intent, rather, is to suggest that we can, in fact, de emphasize it to a very significant extent; which is all we really need do. That being said, however, begs the exposure of the other side of this de emphasized coin, and that is that the rest of us are going to have to be much more generally capable than we currently are, at least population percentage wise. Which means a good number of us will need help in the beginning, and continuing onward, in establishing the alternative.
So. We have two aspects here that need greater clarification:
1. What do the existing experts do in this alternative?
2. How do the rest of us do good enough in whatever situation until greater expertise can be utilized if needed?
Starting with the first one let me again make it clear at the get go that each City State (with my usual rejoinder that "City State" is simply an easy catch all for communities of whatever size participants deem appropriate) will be able to set the specifics of the deals they make for specialists, but I would like to think that they would all revolve around various combinations of resource bonuses (applied to their share of community output), and limits on the total numbers of other task requirements (the community would identify all tasks required to keep it going, group them by type, and then allow each citizen to choose a certain number from each) an expert would have to beyond their expertise..
That last point, certainly, deserves a bit more clarification, at least as to why I prefaced part of the paragraph above with "I would like to think." The bottom line here is that this is meant to be Republic, or a Federation, with a lot of freedom of action for each City Sate. I made that choice because I think it's perfectly clear now that "one size does not fit all." As well to say that we are now figuratively, and literally, "The Relative States of America." This means an overall constitution that keeps a good portion of what it now has, but not necessarily everything; unless, of course, clarifications can be made.
In any case, though, with that flexibility you will inevitably get City States that will simply let experts continue to function has they have, at least in terms of the task groups that everyone else will have to chose from. And if a community wants to do that fine. If it works for them it works for them. I indicated hope here because that's what I'm talking about in getting us all to work together more, across the board, towards what makes our communities go. If nothing else, you would think, sticking with health care, that all doctors, or nurses, or health techs of whatever variety, would want to go out and teach, or evangelize on lifestyle practices that promote good health, in addition to their regular duties. All of which would, it seems to me, to be a very big win win for all concerned. But that's just me.
On number two above we need to consider several, broad stroke, ideas that would be a good starting point. Needless to say, a great deal more thought, and yes, expertise, needs to begin looking into this in a deeper fashion, but we have to start somewhere. And this is where the tech we already have, albeit with knowledge base extensions still required, could help tremendously. Especially if we could make transitioning from one system to another as practically rational as possible. No simple thing either, but the assumption here is that we convince, by greater majority of the electorate, the existing government to work the transition just as if it were a mobilization for a world war (which is pretty close to what we actually did during WW 2, what with the price controls, rationing, production mandates and conscription).
What I am ultimately talking about here is AI assistance that can lead generally capable people through the intricacies of pretty much any kind of task that experts had to be doing before. Assistance that would combine context sensing in detail, with step by step specifics to deal with 85 to 95 percent of the contingencies of most situations. In other words sort of like having robots involved, only they don't do everything. An important point, in my view as we never want to become too separated from all of the things that sustain us. You combine this with both beforehand training on pump, motor, electronic, civil engineering, etc. basics, as well as working with folks who do have the experience, you start to give yourself a fair chance of success. Not for everything mind you, but for a good portion of it.
However you put it, however, there is absolutely no getting round the point that this will be anything but difficult. Things will go very slowly. There will be some very rough spots to get through and it won't happen unless everyone is willing to commit to patience and a lot of sacrifice. And even if we do achieve this it is not going to give us some bright, shiny utopia to finally live in. It will give us a great deal more control over our lives. It will give us actual direct vote Democracy. It will give us a situation where City State's rights actually mean something, even as it works to foster incentives for cooperation; cooperation between folks who don't like each other very much now, and probably still won't when things settle in. And at the end of the day, it will be better for us; for our prosperity long term. For our physical and mental health, and for the health of the planet.
And, if you take the time to get into the arguments presented by Mr. Sanders and Mr. Cruz, just remember this: So much of why healthcare is a bitch to manage in anyway even resembling rationality, these days, is that pretty much everything involved in it is a commodity to one degree or another. And in that we have the "name of the game is net gain" situation in spades. Which means that the output, though some what related to competition, is seldom to do with good outcomes, over all, as much as it is profit for the one whose capital is at risk. Even Insurance, which is supposed to be there to help us pay for it, isn't really there for that at all, but rather as a means to raise enough capital that investment returns can show a profit, putting the incentive to actually pay for any health item right where you would expect it to be.
Change is coming. Of this we can all be certain. Whether the planet forces it on us, or our own insanity forces it on us, or the insane contradictions of Capitalism itself. Change is coming because what we've been doing just won't be able to hold it all together for very much longer. I mean seriously. Where do you think a good portion of all this apocalyptic fever dreaming stems from in the first place? Either we start acting now, because universe knows the lead times on this are really going to be a bitch, so that some reason can be applied to the change effort, or we just wait till circumstances takes all options for rational thought, much less action, out of our hands for a long time to come.
As always, the video here is another take on the alternative:
