From jbone at place.org  Mon Oct 26 07:13:43 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:13:43 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] mappings
In-Reply-To: <E5F46402-6852-4A70-9950-050BA0278AF8@place.org>
References: <E5F46402-6852-4A70-9950-050BA0278AF8@place.org>
Message-ID: <2209864F-A50B-4D84-AA67-74ABF7FAA95E@place.org>


Stephen:

> Which means that their interpretation was discredited. Same gist.

Let's be clear:  their analysis was *correct*.  Inferences drawn from  
it, by the researchers themselves and others, were *not* correct.

This isn't the same as being "discredited."

jb


From eugen at leitl.org  Mon Oct 26 07:13:40 2009
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:13:40 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] [zfs-discuss] Apple cans ZFS project
Message-ID: <20091026141340.GQ27331@leitl.org>


Well, OS X just lost a lot of lustre. FreeBSD starts looking
better & better ;) 

----- Forwarded message from Jeff Bonwick <Jeff.Bonwick at sun.com> -----

From: Jeff Bonwick <Jeff.Bonwick at sun.com>
Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:35:25 -0700
To: David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca>
Cc: zfs-discuss discuss <zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org>
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] Apple cans ZFS project
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.14 (2007-02-12)

> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it  
> (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a "private  
> license" from Sun (with appropriate technical support and  
> indemnification), and the two entities couldn't come to mutually  
> agreeable terms.

I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.

Jeff
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

From jbone at place.org  Mon Oct 26 07:25:31 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:25:31 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] Cutting through the stimulus BS
Message-ID: <EA20B5A5-BEE9-454B-90D9-0D849728C768@place.org>


Stephen asks:

> It's all about psychological effects isn't it?


No.

jb


From eugen at leitl.org  Mon Oct 26 07:45:26 2009
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:45:26 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
Message-ID: <20091026144526.GG30235@leitl.org>


Careful with peak coal, things do not nearly as bountiful as some
may think. Google peak coal oil drum for some less optimistic
projections. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

From sdw at lig.net  Mon Oct 26 08:41:19 2009
From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:41:19 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] [zfs-discuss] Apple cans ZFS project
In-Reply-To: <20091026141340.GQ27331@leitl.org>
References: <20091026141340.GQ27331@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <4AE5C31F.7000704@lig.net>

Eugen Leitl wrote:
> Well, OS X just lost a lot of lustre. FreeBSD starts looking
> better & better ;) 
>   

There is a very good argument that BTRFS is much better than ZFS.  
Likely, that is one major reason Apple dropped ZFS.  The licensing 
friction on ZFS has killed it.  Linux already is including BTRFS, 
although I think you still have to go manual to get root booting from 
it.  Ubuntu 9.10, released this week, seems to include it although it is 
still beta.

BTRFS is pronounced "Butter Filesystem"...  Why not "Better Filesystem"??

http://friendfeed.com/imabonehead/4578fb51/b-trees-shadowing-and-clones-btree_tos-pdf
https://www.usenix.org/events/lsf07/tech/rodeh.pdf
http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/
http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Btrfs_design

sdw
> ----- Forwarded message from Jeff Bonwick <Jeff.Bonwick at sun.com> -----
>
> From: Jeff Bonwick <Jeff.Bonwick at sun.com>
> Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:35:25 -0700
> To: David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca>
> Cc: zfs-discuss discuss <zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org>
> Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] Apple cans ZFS project
> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.14 (2007-02-12)
>
>   
>> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it  
>> (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a "private  
>> license" from Sun (with appropriate technical support and  
>> indemnification), and the two entities couldn't come to mutually  
>> agreeable terms.
>>     
>
> I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.
>
> Jeff
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>   


From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Mon Oct 26 09:14:00 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:14:00 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <20091026144526.GG30235@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <171621.96675.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Mon, 10/26/09, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> 
> Careful with peak coal, things do not nearly as bountiful
> as some may think. Google peak coal oil drum for some less
> optimistic projections. 
> 

The thing I find most scarey, from my vantage point of 62 years, is that people think reserves of 30 years or 100 years are a Good Thing. It seems like the average person reacts to these numbers as if they are a really really long time.

For instance, I just saw a commercial on American TV recently advertising about why I might want to relocate to some state (Minnesota or Michigan or Wisconsin or one of those). A woman, apparently a typical housewife, was bragging ... yes, bragging ... that the state has nearly 40 years! (her exclamation point) of natural gas in the ground. The people behind this ad obviously have the attention span of a politician.

Readily accessable and affordable reserves of non-renewable energy resources -- or any other non-renewable resources, for that matter -- that number in the order of 100 years should scare the heck out of people. 40 years is nothing. Less than nothing. 100 years is barely a blip. At least it is if you care even the slightest about the future of your progeny. I mean your kids, not your great-great-great-grandchildren.

Hell, I plan to live another 40 or so.

         ...ken...


      __________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now
http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com.

From wulfconsumer at gmail.com  Mon Oct 26 12:57:28 2009
From: wulfconsumer at gmail.com (Wulf Losee)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:57:28 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] FoRK Digest, Vol 73, Issue 26
In-Reply-To: <mailman.1.1256583602.13471.fork@xent.com>
References: <mailman.1.1256583602.13471.fork@xent.com>
Message-ID: <14d68d3f0910261257l7e5c8e44n1820dc2be78ba468@mail.gmail.com>

Ken Ganshirt wrote:

> The thing I find most scarey, from my vantage point of 62 years,
> is that people think reserves of 30 years or 100 years are a Good
> Thing. It seems like the average person reacts to these numbers
> as if they are a really really long time.

I agree. However, what I find scary is that the average economist has no
clue what's coming down the road when all the inputs of cheap energy dry up.
Bye, bye global economy, because shipping will become enormously more
expensive. But even as manufacturing localizes, manufacturing costs will
sky-rocket. What happens when the world's economy contracts by 80 percent?

I read an estimate up on the oildrum.com (sorry I don't have the link) that
current daily energy usage equals something like 2500 Gigawatts -- daily!
That would require 2500 Gigawatt nuclear reactors running without down-time
to produce our world's daily energy consumption. But, guess what? -- even if
we got over our fear of nukes, there's not enough uranium to build 2500+
nuclear power plants. Fusion? It's always 30 years around the corner.
Renewable energy sources like wind and solar -- probably good for small
scale local needs -- but you're not going to be able to run a late 20th
economy on the energy these sources will provide.

BTW: Do these climate models that everyone quotes include the variable that
our civilization is pumping out 2500 Gigawatts worth of heat daily? Paul
Krugman, an economist whom I otherwise respect, pointed out on his blog a
few months back that we could obviously see the signs of global warming in
the higher yearly average temps of New York City. Good lord, man -- Global
warming? That's local warming! Civilization pumps out heat. Anyone who's
been in a computer room when the AC goes down should know this
instinctively.

Of course the "green revolution" will soon be over -- because that was
largely based on petroleum inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, transport,
packaging). Very likely we'll see billions of people starve -- probably
including US citizens. And please don't start preaching to me about
sustainable agriculture. I grew up on a hobby farm that my family was
passionate about (they did the whole Rodale thing). It's very labor
intensive, and the outputs just don't compare to petroleum driven big-Ag.

Frankly, I'm glad I probably won't be around in 30 years.

--Wulf

From lucas.gonze at gmail.com  Mon Oct 26 13:18:17 2009
From: lucas.gonze at gmail.com (Lucas Gonze)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:18:17 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
Message-ID: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>

Through provoking stuff from Rohit on the Angstro blog at
http://www.angstro.com/node/61 .  The Marc Davis quote is the one that
really gets me thinking.

===

Yesterday, we had the opportunity to particpate in the 3rd installment
of GigaOm's thought-provoking symposiums they dub ?Bunker Sessions.?
This one,?The Next Web,? started with an insight typical of Om Malik
and his team: while everyone is zigging towards the ?real-time?
buzzword (almost for its own sake!), they're asking pointed questions
about new sources of context, from geospatial to geopolitical.

The most insightful meme I took away from this conversation was from
Marc Davis, former Yahoo! research scientist and current partner at
Invention Arts: ?context exists beyond the data center.?

Or, to paraphrase Steve Blank?s ?inside the building, there are only
opinions,? it might be more pointed to say that ?data centers only
house data?: a mere map of restaurants can't hold a candle to one
that's remixed with your friends have eaten at, enjoyed, and may be
heading to next.

Knowing that the context of the data being uploaded is from a real
person, at a real place, at a real-time is what Davis got at with his
?Web 4? set: Who, What, Where, and When.

In fact, this led Tom Coates to suggest a seeming paradox: ?the only
way to address information overload is with more information: To
determine what?s most relevant, algorithms need even better knowledge
of your geographical and social context.?

When the conversation turned to privacy, Joseph Smarr pointed at the
difference between announcing ?I am here,? and bugging each of your
friends individually to tell them. Sometimes, privacy comes from good
filtering, not simply preventing the information from being shared at
all (egress rather than ingress, so to speak).

The weak link in a centralized aggregation service is sharing or
syndicating over its own APIs. If I report my position to Twitter,
that location is stuffed into the hidden ?resource fork? of a Tweet in
their API. If I report that I'm attending this symposium to LinkedIn,
that fact is stuck in a ?roach motel,? because they have no API access
to event data, as Dave McClure mentioned. Davis concurred that ?large
companies have not create identifiers to make this easier at scale,?
along the lines of Yahoo! Placemaker WOEIDs.

?ngstr??s own Salim Ismail identified a particularly trenchant problem
with social network interoperability: ?Our identities are locked in
walled gardens. It's impossible for me to comment about or contact
someone without going through those gatekeepers. And even if I want to
refer to someone I know on another social network, which of 18
different contexts do I want to refer to him as??

Ultimately, the people in your community define what?s salient for
you, because that?s the shared context that marks your membership in
that community. Adam Hertz, a founder of TuneIn based their product on
that insight: ?We believe people are the best filter, the people you
pay attention to. We pull out all the media in your (inbox), and order
it by popularity within your graph and, more and more, based on how
you respond to it (your engagement).?


From lucas.gonze at gmail.com  Mon Oct 26 14:02:02 2009
From: lucas.gonze at gmail.com (Lucas Gonze)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:02:02 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] commenting on an internet draft?
Message-ID: <ab069aa00910261402i75650f8fi1de3df019ae13a0e@mail.gmail.com>

I'd like to submit comments on
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-02

Anybody know how I go about that?  I'm wondering about the procedural
points, as well as any mailing lists where I should drop in.

(Aside from the IETF-TYPES list, which I'll use to comment on the media type).

From b at b3k.us  Mon Oct 26 14:26:16 2009
From: b at b3k.us (Benjamin Black)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:26:16 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] commenting on an internet draft?
In-Reply-To: <ab069aa00910261402i75650f8fi1de3df019ae13a0e@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261402i75650f8fi1de3df019ae13a0e@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4AE613F8.8030802@b3k.us>

Lucas Gonze wrote:
> I'd like to submit comments on
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-02
> 
> Anybody know how I go about that?  I'm wondering about the procedural
> points, as well as any mailing lists where I should drop in.
> 
> (Aside from the IETF-TYPES list, which I'll use to comment on the media type).

It looks like it is being discussed on the MMUSIC WG mailing list (at
least one thread in August), though it does not appear to have been
adopted as a WG document, yet.  If it has moved to another WG, the
MMUSIC folks should be able to get you to the right place.

http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/mmusic-charter.html

Other than some specific schedule points, there is not much procedural
to know.  If you have questions/concerns/ideas, write them up and put
the draft name somewhere in the subject line to help people recognize
what you're talking about.


b




From lucas.gonze at gmail.com  Mon Oct 26 14:37:49 2009
From: lucas.gonze at gmail.com (Lucas Gonze)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:37:49 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] commenting on an internet draft?
In-Reply-To: <4AE613F8.8030802@b3k.us>
References: <ab069aa00910261402i75650f8fi1de3df019ae13a0e@mail.gmail.com>
	<4AE613F8.8030802@b3k.us>
Message-ID: <ab069aa00910261437x7d303c0br485608e50db1717c@mail.gmail.com>

Thanks, Benjamin, that's just what I needed.

Navigating the standards process always calls for guides.  At the
least know when to stop and ask directions!

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Benjamin Black <b at b3k.us> wrote:
> Lucas Gonze wrote:
>> I'd like to submit comments on
>> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-02
>>
>> Anybody know how I go about that? ?I'm wondering about the procedural
>> points, as well as any mailing lists where I should drop in.
>>
>> (Aside from the IETF-TYPES list, which I'll use to comment on the media type).
>
> It looks like it is being discussed on the MMUSIC WG mailing list (at
> least one thread in August), though it does not appear to have been
> adopted as a WG document, yet. ?If it has moved to another WG, the
> MMUSIC folks should be able to get you to the right place.
>
> http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/mmusic-charter.html
>
> Other than some specific schedule points, there is not much procedural
> to know. ?If you have questions/concerns/ideas, write them up and put
> the draft name somewhere in the subject line to help people recognize
> what you're talking about.
>
>
> b
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>
>


From andre at insite.com.br  Mon Oct 26 15:30:59 2009
From: andre at insite.com.br (Andre Uratsuka Manoel)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:30:59 -0200
Subject: [FoRK] Cutting through the stimulus BS
In-Reply-To: <8E4B57F8-639B-46BE-8EA2-B9AB98437D0C@place.org>
References: <8E4B57F8-639B-46BE-8EA2-B9AB98437D0C@place.org>
Message-ID: <e7fcadd30910261530ide1c0dbm741495827cfa4ada@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 09:54, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
>
> The contribution of any "stimulus" so far is de minimus relative to that.
> ?Hardly surprising. ?Well, except perhaps to a naif or a neo-Keynesian.
>

I know I'll regret answering this, but...

You may end up calling me both naif and neo-keynesian, but still,
"stimuli" do work unless you have perfect information without
assymmetries and prices aren't sticky, i.e., if the efficient market
hypothesis holds, than the stimulus package doesn't work, but then, of
course, no one ever gets rich on the stock market, except by luck, and
we do know that some people do.

Andre


From robert.harley at gmail.com  Mon Oct 26 18:48:06 2009
From: robert.harley at gmail.com (Rob Harley)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:48:06 -0400
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
Message-ID: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>

The end of the world is nigh.  As usual.  Yawn.

From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Mon Oct 26 20:18:33 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:18:33 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <225283.68644.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Mon, 10/26/09, Rob Harley <robert.harley at gmail.com> wrote:

> The end of the world is nigh.?
> As usual.? Yawn.
>

Care to share the source of your optimisim?

        ...ken...


      __________________________________________________________________
Make your browsing faster, safer, and easier with the new Internet Explorer? 8. Optimized for Yahoo! Get it Now for Free! at http://downloads.yahoo.com/ca/internetexplorer/


From andrew at ceruleansystems.com  Mon Oct 26 21:06:05 2009
From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:06:05 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] Cutting through the stimulus BS
In-Reply-To: <e7fcadd30910261530ide1c0dbm741495827cfa4ada@mail.gmail.com>
References: <8E4B57F8-639B-46BE-8EA2-B9AB98437D0C@place.org>
	<e7fcadd30910261530ide1c0dbm741495827cfa4ada@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <51AD7850-8824-4225-9422-E58703CFABD1@ceruleansystems.com>


On Oct 26, 2009, at 3:30 PM, Andre Uratsuka Manoel wrote:
> You may end up calling me both naif and neo-keynesian, but still,
> "stimuli" do work unless you have perfect information without
> assymmetries and prices aren't sticky, i.e., if the efficient market
> hypothesis holds, than the stimulus package doesn't work, but then, of
> course, no one ever gets rich on the stock market, except by luck, and
> we do know that some people do.


There are several levels of distinction required here.  First, there  
is the public markets and then there are the markets. These are not  
the same thing. Government regulations focus most people's attention  
on the public markets; most of the interesting activity is elsewhere.  
Everything you see in the USA news is solely focused on the public  
markets.

I am having difficulty reading your assertion in a way that doesn't  
come out as a non sequitur. Care to elucidate? I have a really hard  
time thinking of any scenario where the nominal stimulus produces a  
positive result.  You seem to be positing a superfluidity that no one  
is claiming exists. It has to be possible to reliably beat the market,  
and some people do, but that says things about the participants in the  
market and not the market itself.


To the point: your model of the "efficient market hypothesis" severely  
and unreasonably bounds the characteristics and capabilities of the  
agents in the market.  You are tacitly assuming similarly competent  
morons.  If this is not in fact the case, and there is no evidence  
that it is, then your model fails. In essence, the "efficient market  
hypothesis" you seem to be using is naive and not reflective of the  
full scope of the hypothesis.

From b at b3k.us  Mon Oct 26 22:34:36 2009
From: b at b3k.us (Benjamin Black)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:34:36 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <171621.96675.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <171621.96675.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4AE6866C.5000103@b3k.us>

It's not just coal.  Pick any element on which we depend (copper, iron,
etc.) and you'll find we have only a few decades remaining before we've
consumed all reasonably available supply.


b


From dmorton at bitfurnace.com  Mon Oct 26 22:51:16 2009
From: dmorton at bitfurnace.com (Damien Morton)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:51:16 +1100
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <4AE6866C.5000103@b3k.us>
References: <171621.96675.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<4AE6866C.5000103@b3k.us>
Message-ID: <8092dc770910262251k4125d6ak67aa9f32064d492d@mail.gmail.com>

Rubbish. With copper, iron, etc consumption, we arent transforming those
materials into unusable forms. Its not like any copper brought into the
world is ever "used up" - it may go to scrap or whatever, but it probably is
more usable as scrap than it was as ore.

Energy is different.

Oh and BTW Iron is one of the most abundant materials on earth.
We aren't running out of it.

Do try to control your hysteria.


On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Benjamin Black <b at b3k.us> wrote:

> It's not just coal.  Pick any element on which we depend (copper, iron,
> etc.) and you'll find we have only a few decades remaining before we've
> consumed all reasonably available supply.
>
>
> b
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>
>

From senqua at googlemail.com  Tue Oct 27 00:23:12 2009
From: senqua at googlemail.com (Harish Singh)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:53:12 +0530
Subject: [FoRK] FoRK Digest, Vol 73, Issue 26
In-Reply-To: <14d68d3f0910261257l7e5c8e44n1820dc2be78ba468@mail.gmail.com>
References: <mailman.1.1256583602.13471.fork@xent.com>
	<14d68d3f0910261257l7e5c8e44n1820dc2be78ba468@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <125097420910270023l7e9fdf6ft73515daaa1bfe1e@mail.gmail.com>

Funny you should mention fusion. Cold fusion with tap water is here
already - without the strings.

Watch cold fusion 4. www.cspenergy.eu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiDkLd6OcO0

coldfusio bumm. www.cspenergy.eu.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ifcnt7Fwnk

coldfusio3. www.cspenergy.eu.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHO16nxbG7c

Kanarev plasma electrolysis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wRSGFOdRmI

- Harish

>> Fusion? It's always 30 years around the corner.

From eugen at leitl.org  Tue Oct 27 00:35:45 2009
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:35:45 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>
References: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org>

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 09:48:06PM -0400, Rob Harley wrote:
> The end of the world is nigh.  As usual.  Yawn.

You exaggerate. As usual. Yawn.


From sdw at lig.net  Tue Oct 27 01:07:54 2009
From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:07:54 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org>
References: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>
	<20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <4AE6AA5A.4050301@lig.net>

Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 09:48:06PM -0400, Rob Harley wrote:
>   
>> The end of the world is nigh.  As usual.  Yawn.
>>     
>
> You exaggerate. As usual. Yawn.
>   

It's the end of the world as you know it.  New shows daily.  Going out 
of business sale, everything must go.  Under new management.  Those 
saying something is impossible are often interrupted by those already 
doing it.  Invent the future.  Be all you can be.


sdw


From sdw at lig.net  Tue Oct 27 01:13:29 2009
From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:13:29 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] FoRK Digest, Vol 73, Issue 26
In-Reply-To: <125097420910270023l7e9fdf6ft73515daaa1bfe1e@mail.gmail.com>
References: <mailman.1.1256583602.13471.fork@xent.com>	<14d68d3f0910261257l7e5c8e44n1820dc2be78ba468@mail.gmail.com>
	<125097420910270023l7e9fdf6ft73515daaa1bfe1e@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4AE6ABA9.7070701@lig.net>

Harish Singh wrote:
> Funny you should mention fusion. Cold fusion with tap water is here
> already - without the strings.
>
> Watch cold fusion 4. www.cspenergy.eu
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiDkLd6OcO0
>   

What is "circular swithed power", really?  Very pithy that swithy.
> coldfusio bumm. www.cspenergy.eu.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ifcnt7Fwnk
>   

Yes, good fusion of H and O2...  Good thing he's taken the precaution of 
a rubber hose in case of fusion.

sdw
> coldfusio3. www.cspenergy.eu.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHO16nxbG7c
>
> Kanarev plasma electrolysis
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wRSGFOdRmI
>
> - Harish
>
>   
>>> Fusion? It's always 30 years around the corner.
>>>       
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>   


From eugen at leitl.org  Tue Oct 27 02:08:13 2009
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:08:13 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <4AE6AA5A.4050301@lig.net>
References: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>
	<20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org> <4AE6AA5A.4050301@lig.net>
Message-ID: <20091027090813.GT17686@leitl.org>

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 01:07:54AM -0700, Stephen Williams wrote:

> It's the end of the world as you know it.  New shows daily.  Going out 
> of business sale, everything must go.  Under new management.  Those 
> saying something is impossible are often interrupted by those already 
> doing it.  Invent the future.  Be all you can be.

We've known how to do it since 1970 at least. Arguably, earlier.
But it takes 20-30 years of massive effort, including minds, hands
and money. 

Do you see much underway in terms of efforts? I don't. Do you see the
kind of people we had in 1950s and 1960s? I don't. Do you see the loose
change we had then? I don't. Do we have still 20-30 years? I'm not sure.

Do I think we're doomed? No. Do we have a good chance of pulling this off?
We'll know soon enough.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

From ejw at cs.ucsc.edu  Tue Oct 27 03:27:18 2009
From: ejw at cs.ucsc.edu (Jim Whitehead)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:27:18 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <20091027090813.GT17686@leitl.org>
References: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>	<20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org>
	<4AE6AA5A.4050301@lig.net> <20091027090813.GT17686@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>

%lurk off

Um, even by the loose standards of post-bubble FoRK, this thread is 
pretty content-free.

Eugen: what is this "it" of which you speak?

Ken: perhaps you could do a few minutes of research on the history of 
reserve projections?

Rob: perhaps you could find an article about how the energy pessimism of 
the 70's gave way to the cheap oil of the 90's?

Benjamin: citations?

%lurk on

- Jim

Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 01:07:54AM -0700, Stephen Williams wrote:
>
>   
>> It's the end of the world as you know it.  New shows daily.  Going out 
>> of business sale, everything must go.  Under new management.  Those 
>> saying something is impossible are often interrupted by those already 
>> doing it.  Invent the future.  Be all you can be.
>>     
>
> We've known how to do it since 1970 at least. Arguably, earlier.
> But it takes 20-30 years of massive effort, including minds, hands
> and money. 
>
> Do you see much underway in terms of efforts? I don't. Do you see the
> kind of people we had in 1950s and 1960s? I don't. Do you see the loose
> change we had then? I don't. Do we have still 20-30 years? I'm not sure.
>
> Do I think we're doomed? No. Do we have a good chance of pulling this off?
> We'll know soon enough.
>
>   

From eugen at leitl.org  Tue Oct 27 03:48:51 2009
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:48:51 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>
References: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>
	<20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org> <4AE6AA5A.4050301@lig.net>
	<20091027090813.GT17686@leitl.org> <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>
Message-ID: <20091027104851.GV17686@leitl.org>

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:27:18AM +0100, Jim Whitehead wrote:

> Um, even by the loose standards of post-bubble FoRK, this thread is 
> pretty content-free.
> 
> Eugen: what is this "it" of which you speak?

Shift to >80% sustainable energy base including fuel liquids
within 20-30 years.

Thought that was pretty much obvious.
 
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

From senqua at googlemail.com  Tue Oct 27 03:59:26 2009
From: senqua at googlemail.com (Harish Singh)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:29:26 +0530
Subject: [FoRK] FoRK Digest, Vol 73, Issue 26
In-Reply-To: <4AE6ABA9.7070701@lig.net>
References: <mailman.1.1256583602.13471.fork@xent.com>
	<14d68d3f0910261257l7e5c8e44n1820dc2be78ba468@mail.gmail.com>
	<125097420910270023l7e9fdf6ft73515daaa1bfe1e@mail.gmail.com>
	<4AE6ABA9.7070701@lig.net>
Message-ID: <a38881390910270359x1fb94665ke5f2a0d63643fa4f@mail.gmail.com>

Don't know much about Circular switched power. The experiments by
Peter Graneau proved "Arc-liberated chemical energy exceeds electrical
input energy" in his 1998 paper. Pity no one was there to notice.

Professor Ph. M. Kanarev gives us the reaction taking place near the cathode:

2H2O =>
2OH- + H+ + H- + 2e- =>?
H + H + 2OH- + 2*0.86eV =>
H2 + 2OH- + 1.72eV + 4.53eV =>
H2 + 2OH- + 6.25eV

- Harish


On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Stephen Williams <sdw at lig.net> wrote:
> Harish Singh wrote:
>>
>> Funny you should mention fusion. Cold fusion with tap water is here
>> already - without the strings.
>>
>> Watch cold fusion 4. www.cspenergy.eu
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiDkLd6OcO0
>>
>
> What is "circular swithed power", really? ?Very pithy that swithy.
>>
>> coldfusio bumm. www.cspenergy.eu.
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ifcnt7Fwnk
>>
>
> Yes, good fusion of H and O2... ?Good thing he's taken the precaution of a
> rubber hose in case of fusion.
>
> sdw
>>
>> coldfusio3. www.cspenergy.eu.
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHO16nxbG7c
>>
>> Kanarev plasma electrolysis
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wRSGFOdRmI
>>
>> - Harish
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>> Fusion? It's always 30 years around the corner.
>>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> FoRK mailing list
>> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>


From mdw at martinwills.com  Tue Oct 27 05:10:16 2009
From: mdw at martinwills.com (mdw at martinwills.com)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:10:16 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <20091027104851.GV17686@leitl.org>
References: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>
	<20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org> <4AE6AA5A.4050301@lig.net>
	<20091027090813.GT17686@leitl.org> <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>
	<20091027104851.GV17686@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <fb2a41b4215e52e417ce7fc7d7d16761.squirrel@webmail.martinwills.com>

> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:27:18AM +0100, Jim Whitehead wrote:
>
>> Um, even by the loose standards of post-bubble FoRK, this thread is
>> pretty content-free.
>>
>> Eugen: what is this "it" of which you speak?
>
> Shift to >80% sustainable energy base including fuel liquids
> within 20-30 years.
>
> Thought that was pretty much obvious.
>
> --
> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org


I don't know about you guys... But, I look forward to serving our
wood-fiber based overlords.

--Martin--


From b at b3k.us  Tue Oct 27 09:13:35 2009
From: b at b3k.us (Benjamin Black)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:13:35 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <8092dc770910262251k4125d6ak67aa9f32064d492d@mail.gmail.com>
References: <171621.96675.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com>	<4AE6866C.5000103@b3k.us>
	<8092dc770910262251k4125d6ak67aa9f32064d492d@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4AE71C2F.4030207@b3k.us>

Damien Morton wrote:
> Rubbish. With copper, iron, etc consumption, we arent transforming those
> materials into unusable forms. Its not like any copper brought into the
> world is ever "used up" - it may go to scrap or whatever, but it probably is
> more usable as scrap than it was as ore.
> 

This does not address the fundamental problem that demand is huge and
supply is finite.  Certainly we will (and do) recycle copper, but the
demand continues to rise and the end is in sight for copper ore.  That
is neither rubbish nor hysteria.

I found this article quite good reading on the subject:
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/5/1209.full

> Energy is different.
> 

Perhaps, though perhaps not.  If we dissipate a material so thoroughly
(as we do with materials like zinc) that recovery is impractical given
the energy and technology required, then it becomes single use.

> Oh and BTW Iron is one of the most abundant materials on earth.
> We aren't running out of it.

Yes, you are correct.


b


From sdw at lig.net  Tue Oct 27 09:14:03 2009
From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:14:03 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>
References: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>	<20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org>	<4AE6AA5A.4050301@lig.net>
	<20091027090813.GT17686@leitl.org> <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>
Message-ID: <4AE71C4B.5040601@lig.net>

Jim Whitehead wrote:
> %lurk off
>
> Um, even by the loose standards of post-bubble FoRK, this thread is 
> pretty content-free.
>
> Eugen: what is this "it" of which you speak?
>
> Ken: perhaps you could do a few minutes of research on the history of 
> reserve projections?
>
> Rob: perhaps you could find an article about how the energy pessimism 
> of the 70's gave way to the cheap oil of the 90's?
>
> Benjamin: citations?
>
> %lurk on
>
> - Jim
Jim: Don't you have students you can put on this?? ;-)

Stephen
>
> Eugen Leitl wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 01:07:54AM -0700, Stephen Williams wrote:
>>
>>  
>>> It's the end of the world as you know it.  New shows daily.  Going 
>>> out of business sale, everything must go.  Under new management.  
>>> Those saying something is impossible are often interrupted by those 
>>> already doing it.  Invent the future.  Be all you can be.
>>>     
>>
>> We've known how to do it since 1970 at least. Arguably, earlier.
>> But it takes 20-30 years of massive effort, including minds, hands
>> and money.
>> Do you see much underway in terms of efforts? I don't. Do you see the
>> kind of people we had in 1950s and 1960s? I don't. Do you see the loose
>> change we had then? I don't. Do we have still 20-30 years? I'm not sure.
>>
>> Do I think we're doomed? No. Do we have a good chance of pulling this 
>> off?
>> We'll know soon enough.
>>
>>   
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork


From b at b3k.us  Tue Oct 27 09:29:42 2009
From: b at b3k.us (Benjamin Black)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:29:42 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>
References: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>	<20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org>	<4AE6AA5A.4050301@lig.net>
	<20091027090813.GT17686@leitl.org> <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>
Message-ID: <4AE71FF6.4080000@b3k.us>

Jim Whitehead wrote:
> 
> Benjamin: citations?
> 

http://www.pnas.org/content/103/5/1209.full


From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Tue Oct 27 10:01:15 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:01:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>
Message-ID: <297820.54018.qm@web33008.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Tue, 10/27/09, Jim Whitehead <ejw at cs.ucsc.edu> wrote:
> 
> Ken: perhaps you could do a few minutes of research on the
> history of reserve projections?
> 

I have. Two things about that:

First, projections are ... well, projections. It's like politics: it depends on who you believe. Because many projections *are* simply politics. To wit: OPEC projections. Their allowable sales are based on their estimates of reserves. So, if any OPEC country wants to increase the volume they are selling, they have to increase their reserve projections accordingly. You can't trust any of their numbers for proven or projected reserves.

Even if you choose to believe, say, the most optimistic of projections out there, none of them are projecting, say, centuries of availability of the quantities we need now and will need in the future, as energy resource consumption grows.

But the bottom line is that projections are worthless without an associated measure of extraction and transportation costs. That is, a surfeit of projected reserves is not very relevant if some significant percentage of those projected reserves are extremely costly to extract and transport.

Obviously, if the markets are willing to pay the price, the energy companies will figure out a way to get the stuff out of the ground and the transportation companies will haul it pretty much anywhere. But quantity is not the issue.

The issue is: at what price does the cost of energy that we are so dependent upon and addicted to become too expensive to sustain our current way of life? Note, it's the combination of "cheap" and "energy", not just availability of energy, per se, that supports our current way of life. 

"Availability" is a function of both quantity and price. Even if we continue to find new sources, the extraction and transportation costs will reach a point that the price will be a major disruptive factor.

This is particularly true in the United States because of the entitlement mentality associated with *cheap* energy.

Second, that was not my point in any case. 

My point was the short-term thinking I see everywhere I look. Some of it is institutionalized. Eg. politics (election terms) and commerce (the need to keep juicing quarterly performance numbers). 

It's not non-renewable energy resource availability that scares me the most. It's that persistence of short-term thinking, combined with the blind faith that "technology" will somehow continue to bail our asses out, is what I find most scarey. 

 ...ken...


      __________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now
http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com.

From andrew at ceruleansystems.com  Tue Oct 27 10:23:51 2009
From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:23:51 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <8092dc770910262251k4125d6ak67aa9f32064d492d@mail.gmail.com>
References: <171621.96675.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<4AE6866C.5000103@b3k.us>
	<8092dc770910262251k4125d6ak67aa9f32064d492d@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C1B72AC-82BB-4753-9609-0CF0F5554D17@ceruleansystems.com>


On Oct 26, 2009, at 10:51 PM, Damien Morton wrote:
> Rubbish. With copper, iron, etc consumption, we arent transforming  
> those
> materials into unusable forms. Its not like any copper brought into  
> the
> world is ever "used up" - it may go to scrap or whatever, but it  
> probably is
> more usable as scrap than it was as ore.


This is not generally true. There are substantial losses in industrial  
processes where the waste is diluted to levels that cannot be  
economically recovered. Even for high-value metals like gold this  
amounts to thousands of tons of permanent loss. The cumulative losses  
of this type are significant, and essentially entropy in action.

The thermodynamics is not favorable.  Most metal concentrations in the  
Earth's crust were created by hydrothermal gradients. A lot of energy  
was expended in the creation of the metal concentrations we exploit  
today.


From eugen at leitl.org  Tue Oct 27 10:54:14 2009
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:54:14 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <4C1B72AC-82BB-4753-9609-0CF0F5554D17@ceruleansystems.com>
References: <171621.96675.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<4AE6866C.5000103@b3k.us>
	<8092dc770910262251k4125d6ak67aa9f32064d492d@mail.gmail.com>
	<4C1B72AC-82BB-4753-9609-0CF0F5554D17@ceruleansystems.com>
Message-ID: <20091027175414.GI17686@leitl.org>

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:23:51AM -0700, J. Andrew Rogers wrote:

> This is not generally true. There are substantial losses in industrial  
> processes where the waste is diluted to levels that cannot be  
> economically recovered. Even for high-value metals like gold this  
> amounts to thousands of tons of permanent loss. The cumulative losses  
> of this type are significant, and essentially entropy in action.
> 
> The thermodynamics is not favorable.  Most metal concentrations in the  
> Earth's crust were created by hydrothermal gradients. A lot of energy  
> was expended in the creation of the metal concentrations we exploit  
> today.

Indeed, see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3086 for an overview.
(I do not claim that the numbers are authoritative, just that the
qualitative trends are accurate).

Notice that the core bottleneck is energy. Synfuels, dilute
resource enrichment, food production, all need cheap, plentiful
energy.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Tue Oct 27 11:22:42 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:22:42 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <4AE71FF6.4080000@b3k.us>
Message-ID: <154660.21102.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Tue, 10/27/09, Benjamin Black <b at b3k.us> wrote:
> > 
> > Benjamin: citations?
> > 
> 
> http://www.pnas.org/content/103/5/1209.full
> 

Thanks for that. They did a good job of using plain language without detracting from the technical credibility.

        ...ken...


      __________________________________________________________________
Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr! 

http://www.flickr.com/gift/

From eugen at leitl.org  Tue Oct 27 12:54:19 2009
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:54:19 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <154660.21102.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <4AE71FF6.4080000@b3k.us>
	<154660.21102.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20091027195419.GK17686@leitl.org>

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:22:42AM -0700, Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo wrote:

> > http://www.pnas.org/content/103/5/1209.full
> > 
> 
> Thanks for that. They did a good job of using plain language without detracting from the technical credibility.

I don't see any mention of ore richness going down 
versus energy used for extraction going up. Including
EROEI for energy extraction itself, of course.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Tue Oct 27 13:19:13 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:19:13 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <20091027195419.GK17686@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <656498.43299.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Tue, 10/27/09, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> 
> > > http://www.pnas.org/content/103/5/1209.full
> > > 
> > 
> > Thanks for that. They did a good job of using plain
> language without detracting from the technical credibility.
> 
> I don't see any mention of ore richness going down 
> versus energy used for extraction going up. Including
> EROEI for energy extraction itself, of course.
> 

That would have contributed nothing to their paper. Not that those issues are pointless. They are, indeed, an important part of the larger issue. They just weren't the point of the paper.

And therein lies part of the problem of wider understanding of the issue of planetary despoilation. To do such detailed analysis necessarily requires a focus. There are many such focused efforts going on. But it requires someone with a more holistic view to, then, take these individual focused efforts and piece them together into chapters to see what sort of story they add up to. Or if they add up to anything at all.

 ...ken...


      __________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now
http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com.

From aaron at bavariati.org  Tue Oct 27 15:02:57 2009
From: aaron at bavariati.org (Aaron Burt)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:02:57 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <20091027104851.GV17686@leitl.org>
References: <bfcef1040910261848n46b6ac5dr9da357ad55986f13@mail.gmail.com>
	<20091027073545.GO17686@leitl.org> <4AE6AA5A.4050301@lig.net>
	<20091027090813.GT17686@leitl.org> <4AE6CB06.7040605@cs.ucsc.edu>
	<20091027104851.GV17686@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <20091027220257.GA981@aaron-xps>

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:48:51AM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:27:18AM +0100, Jim Whitehead wrote:

> > Eugen: what is this "it" of which you speak?
> 
> Shift to >80% sustainable energy base including fuel liquids
> within 20-30 years.

Not to worry, we're trying.  Just gotta stay quiet about the ultimate
life-style implications so we don't spook the hoi polloi.

In completely unrelated news, my wife just got back from a draft-horse
driving workshop.


From tomhiggins at gmail.com  Tue Oct 27 15:33:58 2009
From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:33:58 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] Hatching startups
In-Reply-To: <20091018074521.GA19717@aaron-x31>
References: <20091018074521.GA19717@aaron-x31>
Message-ID: <e3b2914c0910271533g79b0c9daw792b1a04ae7a4e9@mail.gmail.com>

Welcome back to Portland where the living is good and the eats are the yum.


-tom(if your from cali, please remember Portland sucks and you do not
want to move here, srsly)higgins

From tomhiggins at gmail.com  Tue Oct 27 15:43:21 2009
From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:43:21 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] Nook E-Reader - or Nookie Reader
In-Reply-To: <20091022132231.GZ27331@leitl.org>
References: <4AE065FF.1000704@inkworkswell.com>
	<692a81590910220618k27e21688gb16e2a1ef02837a0@mail.gmail.com>
	<20091022132231.GZ27331@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <e3b2914c0910271543g5158b1c2wf550c5f90aee374b@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 6:22 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 08:18:36AM -0500, Ken Meltsner wrote:
>
>> Just one more example of the 21st century clashing with the 19th.
>
> Nothing what bookchan can't handle.

I know I do not have the reading volume/depth that some on the list
have, but I have only had one or two occasions where I could not find
a book/feed/website/article I wanted to read in a format I could then
turn into an epub (gota love Caliber, the weekly builds just keep
making it better.) My main problem now is finding time to read all the
titles on the GotaRead list.

One of the books I did not , in fact did not even want to, find in
ebook format was Alton Browns new  Good Eats Volume 1. The book is
massive and works much better as a dead tree artifact than it would as
an ebook.  I also went out and purchased two paperback versions of
books I wanted to read on my device but could only find in the
interzonewebtuberents.

ymmv, toot toot  chuga chuga

-tom(parents will get that one)higgins

From tomhiggins at gmail.com  Tue Oct 27 16:28:06 2009
From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:28:06 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
In-Reply-To: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e3b2914c0910271628q231e3d2co5b19cda7aa386d82@mail.gmail.com>

In large part the whole journey of the intertubes since around 96 or
so has been about the filters. Robust, personal, morphable and
permeable filters chuck out the cruft and let you focus on the
possible. In another years the term Expert Systems would have cropped
up  but I think that term has lost as much cred as the term Spice
Girls. Many of the most useful apps I use are filters of sorts, or
filter helpers.

Usenet would have been impossible with out the veneer of that danged
hierarchy to filter down some of the cruft. Add to that what ever
filtering your  news reader could deal with. If you were hitting on
the .binaries you needed a whole other set of help

Email as well, without white/black list the late 90's/early 00's would
have been more hell then they were. Watching the spamfilter wars you
could see in a very real manner the importance of proper filtration
hygine. Wave just amplifies that need.

Social filters helped bring out and mute down the stream of tasty bit
that demanded to be devoured, many times the value of my friends
filters went a long way into helping me with my own. With our ever
increasing circle of socialite "friends" to add to our mix though it
seemed filters were needed for our possible filter sources. It was not
good enough that I know you , i need to know that you  knew a little
ablut me as well and that we both had at least a few shaded(y) areas
on our venn diagrams.

Geospacial tagging of data/feed items/sources would be nice. Not just
though from proximity marketing or AR fun. Temporal tagging  has some
promise as well. Being able to see historic trends rise and fall like
so much snow globe glitter could prove harvestable/useful. Look at all
the misery you can bring on with Wayback:)-

Yet at the bottom of the pile of filter turtles there is me though,
changeable pissoffable moody me and if my filters are to be of any use
they had better be able to move with the big guy. This is why I am
still the last line arbiter  on both the input and output of whatever
filtration method(s)/device(s) are being used.

Which is why I very much wish FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Good Reads  and a
host of other apps/services would open things up some so even pheezers
like me can grab the streams and plug them into our own filtering
methods such that the outputs are not so fractured across sources.
Google's recent Social Circle idea has some promise, so would
something like Pipes...better yet would be just let me have at a
simple set of perl/php/python widgets from which  I could bodge
something up in bash and thus bang on all the feeds/apis to get at the
Grand Unified Filtered

A while back I worked up a stupid simple set of rss/email gegaws to
work with my Tux Driod. It was hella nice till I got tired of the
voices...even the better more bitfull sample sets can wear on you
after a while...plus the wife and kids were wondering about my sanity
as I kept talking back to it(and my wife at least realized there was
no code or device really listening) My dream version would have a base
vocab set done up by Stepehn Fry, whose clock sound samples I have
been mucking around with. Brill.

Thats one of the things I keep coming back to on the filter front,
even back in my BBS days. All that output needs a better way to get to
me. I recently started using Cailber to take my google reader feed and
stuff it in a daily crafted epub. I also use places like
Spokenword.org to gather up the net/podcasts I know i want hear.
(http://www.spokenword.org/member/403)

So all this to say if this is the trending  dev focus, heck yea and more of it.

-tom(who looks to Mark Bittman for his minimalistfu)higgins

From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Tue Oct 27 16:52:57 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:52:57 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <20091027220257.GA981@aaron-xps>
Message-ID: <986644.24608.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Tue, 10/27/09, Aaron Burt <aaron at bavariati.org> wrote:
> 
> > > Eugen: what is this "it" of which you speak?
> > 
> > Shift to >80% sustainable energy base including fuel liquids
> > within 20-30 years.
> 
> Not to worry, we're trying.? Just gotta stay quiet about the ultimate
> life-style implications so we don't spook the hoi polloi.
> 
> In completely unrelated news, my wife just got back from a
> draft-horse driving workshop.
> 

It's interesting that even using horsey power has environmental overhead issues. Using draft horses requires that the production from about 40% of the tilled acreage be used for fuelling the horses. (Would you guess that's about the same as you would need if you were going to use biofuel in the tractor?? Or are horses more efficient? Anyone know of a source for such figures?) 

One of the reasons oxen were so popular for early transportation of goods is that they can work with only grass for feed. Horses can live on grass but if you are going to work them they need grain (higher energy concentration). That made them quite impractical for hauling serious loads over long distances (there weren't many grain refuelling stations when the early settlers were still spreading out).

Just in case your wife is interested. A couple of steers might be a better investment. ;-)

        ...ken...


      __________________________________________________________________
Make your browsing faster, safer, and easier with the new Internet Explorer? 8. Optimized for Yahoo! Get it Now for Free! at http://downloads.yahoo.com/ca/internetexplorer/


From b at b3k.us  Tue Oct 27 17:53:33 2009
From: b at b3k.us (Benjamin Black)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:53:33 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <656498.43299.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <656498.43299.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4AE7960D.4000702@b3k.us>

This article is one I had been looking for since it has the pretty
pictures I so enjoy:
http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/027ns_005.htm?id=mg19426051.200&print=true



b


From aaron at bavariati.org  Tue Oct 27 18:49:43 2009
From: aaron at bavariati.org (Aaron Burt)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:49:43 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] peak coal
In-Reply-To: <986644.24608.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <20091027220257.GA981@aaron-xps>
	<986644.24608.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20091028014943.GA10461@aaron-xps>

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 04:52:57PM -0700, Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo wrote:

> It's interesting that even using horsey power has environmental overhead
> issues. Using draft horses requires that the production from about 40% of
> the tilled acreage be used for fuelling the horses.

Tha Wife is the expert on horse and cow nutrition - we have the books at
home, but that sounds a bit high.  Also depends on whether you can use
marginal land as pasture, and whether you count manure as fertilizer.

> (Would you guess that's about the same as you would need if you were
> going to use biofuel in the tractor?? Or are horses more efficient?
> Anyone know of a source for such figures?) 

I've seen (biased) studies that put horses and tractors even, or put horses
ahead, depending on how you count energy, which field->fuel technologies
are used and whose production figures you believe.  But as Eugen points
out, photosynthesis is not terribly efficient.

> One of the reasons oxen were so popular for early transportation of goods
> is that they can work with only grass for feed. Horses can live on grass
> but if you are going to work them they need grain (higher energy
> concentration).

Feed rationing is complicated.  But yes, oxen are great.  Simpler harness,
too - no big leather collar, no hames to bonk you in the head.

If we get to the point of producing PV arrays and high-capacity batteries
using renewable energy, we'll be home free.  "Plan B" does make for a great
hobby, though.



From lucas.gonze at gmail.com  Wed Oct 28 10:21:37 2009
From: lucas.gonze at gmail.com (Lucas Gonze)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:21:37 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
In-Reply-To: <e3b2914c0910271628q231e3d2co5b19cda7aa386d82@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910271628q231e3d2co5b19cda7aa386d82@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <ab069aa00910281021m637f7779va48689ea34decc9b@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Tom Higgins <tomhiggins at gmail.com> wrote:
> I recently started using Cailber to take my google reader feed and
> stuff it in a daily crafted epub.

That's a cool idea.  Do you have a cron job?  How do you automate Caliber?

> (http://www.spokenword.org/member/403)

Spokenword.org is a real improvement on "podcasting," which has become
a minor planet in the Apple galaxy.

> In large part the whole journey of the intertubes since around 96 or
> so has been about the filters. Robust, personal, morphable and
> permeable filters chuck out the cruft and let you focus on the
> possible. In another years the term Expert Systems would have cropped
> up ?but I think that term has lost as much cred as the term Spice
> Girls. Many of the most useful apps I use are filters of sorts, or
> filter helpers.
>
> Usenet would have been impossible with out the veneer of that danged
> hierarchy to filter down some of the cruft. Add to that what ever
> filtering your ?news reader could deal with. If you were hitting on
> the .binaries you needed a whole other set of help
>
> Email as well, without white/black list the late 90's/early 00's would
> have been more hell then they were. Watching the spamfilter wars you
> could see in a very real manner the importance of proper filtration
> hygine. Wave just amplifies that need.
>
> Social filters helped bring out and mute down the stream of tasty bit
> that demanded to be devoured, many times the value of my friends
> filters went a long way into helping me with my own. With our ever
> increasing circle of socialite "friends" to add to our mix though it
> seemed filters were needed for our possible filter sources. It was not
> good enough that I know you , i need to know that you ?knew a little
> ablut me as well and that we both had at least a few shaded(y) areas
> on our venn diagrams.
>
> Geospacial tagging of data/feed items/sources would be nice. Not just
> though from proximity marketing or AR fun. Temporal tagging ?has some
> promise as well. Being able to see historic trends rise and fall like
> so much snow globe glitter could prove harvestable/useful. Look at all
> the misery you can bring on with Wayback:)-
>
> Yet at the bottom of the pile of filter turtles there is me though,
> changeable pissoffable moody me and if my filters are to be of any use
> they had better be able to move with the big guy. This is why I am
> still the last line arbiter ?on both the input and output of whatever
> filtration method(s)/device(s) are being used.
>
> Which is why I very much wish FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Good Reads ?and a
> host of other apps/services would open things up some so even pheezers
> like me can grab the streams and plug them into our own filtering
> methods such that the outputs are not so fractured across sources.
> Google's recent Social Circle idea has some promise, so would
> something like Pipes...better yet would be just let me have at a
> simple set of perl/php/python widgets from which ?I could bodge
> something up in bash and thus bang on all the feeds/apis to get at the
> Grand Unified Filtered
>
> A while back I worked up a stupid simple set of rss/email gegaws to
> work with my Tux Driod. It was hella nice till I got tired of the
> voices...even the better more bitfull sample sets can wear on you
> after a while...plus the wife and kids were wondering about my sanity
> as I kept talking back to it(and my wife at least realized there was
> no code or device really listening) My dream version would have a base
> vocab set done up by Stepehn Fry, whose clock sound samples I have
> been mucking around with. Brill.
>
> Thats one of the things I keep coming back to on the filter front,
> even back in my BBS days. All that output needs a better way to get to
> me. I recently started using Cailber to take my google reader feed and
> stuff it in a daily crafted epub. I also use places like
> Spokenword.org to gather up the net/podcasts I know i want hear.
> (http://www.spokenword.org/member/403)
>
> So all this to say if this is the trending ?dev focus, heck yea and more of it.
>
> -tom(who looks to Mark Bittman for his minimalistfu)higgins
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>


From tomhiggins at gmail.com  Wed Oct 28 15:35:23 2009
From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:35:23 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
In-Reply-To: <ab069aa00910281021m637f7779va48689ea34decc9b@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910271628q231e3d2co5b19cda7aa386d82@mail.gmail.com>
	<ab069aa00910281021m637f7779va48689ea34decc9b@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e3b2914c0910281535k7b3f7415v38ef64f917755c70@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Lucas Gonze <lucas.gonze at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Tom Higgins <tomhiggins at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I recently started using Cailber to take my google reader feed and
>> stuff it in a daily crafted epub.
>
> That's a cool idea. ?Do you have a cron job? ?How do you automate Caliber?
>

Calibre has its own scheduling system to both grab feeds to convert to
book and to put them on my device. Now you may ask "you keep the app
running all the time?" and the answer is yes for a couple of reason.
Calibre also has a web interface to the book collection, very slick in
fact. One can thus grab books/feeds on any device thats able to get a
connection to the housenet. I have a pal who uses Stanza to get books
from me. It is a very sweet app, crossplatform and constantly being
worked on.


>> (http://www.spokenword.org/member/403)
>
> Spokenword.org is a real improvement on "podcasting," which has become
> a minor planet in the Apple galaxy.

Netcasting has waxed and wanned for me a number of times over the
years. In the end its all about the content, when its doen badly i am
far far away. I did not know the Beatles' music company was into
netcasting though...go figure.


-tom(-)higgins


From lucas.gonze at gmail.com  Wed Oct 28 16:19:50 2009
From: lucas.gonze at gmail.com (Lucas Gonze)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:19:50 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
In-Reply-To: <e3b2914c0910281535k7b3f7415v38ef64f917755c70@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910271628q231e3d2co5b19cda7aa386d82@mail.gmail.com>
	<ab069aa00910281021m637f7779va48689ea34decc9b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910281535k7b3f7415v38ef64f917755c70@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <ab069aa00910281619j136251fwf4ab6785373da132@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Tom Higgins > Calibre has its own
scheduling system to both grab feeds to convert to
> book and to put them on my device. Now you may ask "you keep the app
> running all the time?" and the answer is yes for a couple of reason.
> Calibre also has a web interface to the book collection, very slick in
> fact. One can thus grab books/feeds on any device thats able to get a
> connection to the housenet. I have a pal who uses Stanza to get books
> from me. It is a very sweet app, crossplatform and constantly being
> worked on.

Stanza is nice, but now that it's Amazon I fear for it.

What reader do you use?  Kindle?

From tomhiggins at gmail.com  Wed Oct 28 17:56:22 2009
From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:56:22 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
In-Reply-To: <ab069aa00910281619j136251fwf4ab6785373da132@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910271628q231e3d2co5b19cda7aa386d82@mail.gmail.com>
	<ab069aa00910281021m637f7779va48689ea34decc9b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910281535k7b3f7415v38ef64f917755c70@mail.gmail.com>
	<ab069aa00910281619j136251fwf4ab6785373da132@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e3b2914c0910281756g3116e71difed9b8cac762d58c@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Lucas Gonze <lucas.gonze at gmail.com> wrote:
> What reader do you use? ?Kindle?

Gad zooks nope. Sony PR505..no net connection means I read when Im
reading:)-  I have an 8gb sd card for loading up books and such and
when I pop in the usb cable for recharging I get my feeds and such
moved over automagicaly. Yes I know its positively luditesque of me,
but feh.

Stanza I have only used on a friends iPhoney. It is a great epub
reader with several great online epub sources built in for easy
grabbing of books. It would be a shame if Amazon fuxored it up.

-tom(still scratching my head over how amazon fuxed with mobipocket,
shame)higgins


From lucas.gonze at gmail.com  Wed Oct 28 18:31:49 2009
From: lucas.gonze at gmail.com (Lucas Gonze)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:31:49 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
In-Reply-To: <e3b2914c0910281756g3116e71difed9b8cac762d58c@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910271628q231e3d2co5b19cda7aa386d82@mail.gmail.com>
	<ab069aa00910281021m637f7779va48689ea34decc9b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910281535k7b3f7415v38ef64f917755c70@mail.gmail.com>
	<ab069aa00910281619j136251fwf4ab6785373da132@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910281756g3116e71difed9b8cac762d58c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <ab069aa00910281831kdfd5e81u913ab769a0cd5f77@mail.gmail.com>

As much of a pain in the ass as epub is, mobipocket and the Kindle are
that much worse.  What a drag Amazon is about this technology.

I think the blocker is that they see the product as a mobile bookstore
-- theirs -- rather than a computer with the form factor of paper.

For example, you can't just copy an image or HTML file onto the
Kindle.  And PDF...  That story has been told too many times but it's
still kind of whacky.

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Tom Higgins <tomhiggins at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Lucas Gonze <lucas.gonze at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What reader do you use? ?Kindle?
>
> Gad zooks nope. Sony PR505..no net connection means I read when Im
> reading:)- ?I have an 8gb sd card for loading up books and such and
> when I pop in the usb cable for recharging I get my feeds and such
> moved over automagicaly. Yes I know its positively luditesque of me,
> but feh.
>
> Stanza I have only used on a friends iPhoney. It is a great epub
> reader with several great online epub sources built in for easy
> grabbing of books. It would be a shame if Amazon fuxored it up.
>
> -tom(still scratching my head over how amazon fuxed with mobipocket,
> shame)higgins
>
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>


From meltsner at alum.mit.edu  Wed Oct 28 18:45:58 2009
From: meltsner at alum.mit.edu (Ken Meltsner)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:45:58 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] New Cory Doctorow
Message-ID: <692a81590910281845g78c176a3ucf40dfd8304cdba9@mail.gmail.com>

Somewhat related to the usual talk here of IP rights, etc., Cory
Doctorow's latest book, _Makers_., is available in a variety of
formats, including epub for the eink crowd:

http://craphound.com/makers/

Capsule: Really, really down and out in the Magic Kingdom.  A prequel
of sorts to _Down and Out_ mixed with a healthy dose of Vernor
Vinge-ian innovation and highjinks as we start up the steep part of
the curve towards the singularity.

Ken Meltsner


-- 
House Fix 2009 has begun!
# of major projects pending: 3 (so far -- Complete the big bookcase,
paint house exterior, fix all the drywall cracks in the LR ceiling)
# of major projects completed: 2 (Wallpaper stripped from DR and
powder room, walls painted, new oak molding and spiffy fixtures in PR)

From tomhiggins at gmail.com  Wed Oct 28 21:08:00 2009
From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:08:00 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
In-Reply-To: <ab069aa00910281831kdfd5e81u913ab769a0cd5f77@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910271628q231e3d2co5b19cda7aa386d82@mail.gmail.com>
	<ab069aa00910281021m637f7779va48689ea34decc9b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910281535k7b3f7415v38ef64f917755c70@mail.gmail.com>
	<ab069aa00910281619j136251fwf4ab6785373da132@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910281756g3116e71difed9b8cac762d58c@mail.gmail.com>
	<ab069aa00910281831kdfd5e81u913ab769a0cd5f77@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e3b2914c0910282108p6c41cbe1r94439f6dd48f2bf@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 6:31 PM, Lucas Gonze <lucas.gonze at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For example, you can't just copy an image or HTML file onto the
> Kindle. ?And PDF... ?That story has been told too many times but it's
> still kind of whacky.

 The PDF thing is wacky.  On the 505 I can just drop em on the sd or
move em over the usb and then open em up on the reader. It even has
some amount of what they are calling text Reflow, even grfx rich pdfs
can get a font zoom boost if you want (for us of the poor eyesight). I
like epub over pdf but pdfs are all good. the one exception is if they
are all grfx(scanned as images rather than ocr or made from scratch as
text with grfx), then not so hot.

Now my old Plam Lifedrive has Mobireader on it amongst other readers
like plucker and cspot etc etc. It had many many years of being
useful. I hear tell all drmed books from the pre Amazon Mobi days are
now fuxored license wise. Great example of why it is  DRM  FTL.

-tom(maybe old mobipocket drm purchasers can seek some bailout money
to cover losses (tossed that one in for jb))higgins


From sdw at lig.net  Wed Oct 28 22:20:11 2009
From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:20:11 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
In-Reply-To: <e3b2914c0910282108p6c41cbe1r94439f6dd48f2bf@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>	<e3b2914c0910271628q231e3d2co5b19cda7aa386d82@mail.gmail.com>	<ab069aa00910281021m637f7779va48689ea34decc9b@mail.gmail.com>	<e3b2914c0910281535k7b3f7415v38ef64f917755c70@mail.gmail.com>	<ab069aa00910281619j136251fwf4ab6785373da132@mail.gmail.com>	<e3b2914c0910281756g3116e71difed9b8cac762d58c@mail.gmail.com>	<ab069aa00910281831kdfd5e81u913ab769a0cd5f77@mail.gmail.com>
	<e3b2914c0910282108p6c41cbe1r94439f6dd48f2bf@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4AE9260B.1080907@lig.net>

Tom Higgins wrote:
> ...
> Now my old Plam Lifedrive has Mobireader on it amongst other readers
> like plucker and cspot etc etc. It had many many years of being
> useful. I hear tell all drmed books from the pre Amazon Mobi days are
> now fuxored license wise. Great example of why it is  DRM  FTL.
>
> -tom(maybe old mobipocket drm purchasers can seek some bailout money
> to cover losses (tossed that one in for jb))higgins
>   

I think it is wrong for a user to lose access to content they have paid 
for due to DRM no longer working.  I would heavily favor a fix it or 
lose it clause so that if DRM or other associated reader technology 
doesn't exist, that the user is able to get access to the unDRM'd 
version of the content.  Have it deposited in escrow or something, or 
simply allow legal hacks at that point to free it.

That provides some nice pressure on content owners and distributors to 
do it right in some consumer friendly sense or don't do it.

Stephen


From sdw at lig.net  Wed Oct 28 22:38:47 2009
From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:38:47 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] insights on Angstro blog
In-Reply-To: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
References: <ab069aa00910261318lc6b7738n4b7343b45e7bad1c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4AE92A67.7090409@lig.net>

Lucas Gonze wrote:
> Through provoking stuff from Rohit on the Angstro blog at
> http://www.angstro.com/node/61 .  The Marc Davis quote is the one that
> really gets me thinking.
>
> ===
> ...
>
> In fact, this led Tom Coates to suggest a seeming paradox: ?the only
> way to address information overload is with more information: To
> determine what?s most relevant, algorithms need even better knowledge
> of your geographical and social context.?
>
> When the conversation turned to privacy, Joseph Smarr pointed at the
> difference between announcing ?I am here,? and bugging each of your
> friends individually to tell them. Sometimes, privacy comes from good
> filtering, not simply preventing the information from being shared at
> all (egress rather than ingress, so to speak).
>   

Privacy is secondary to good socializing and/or accomplishing something 
for most people most of the time.
> The weak link in a centralized aggregation service is sharing or
> syndicating over its own APIs. If I report my position to Twitter,
> that location is stuffed into the hidden ?resource fork? of a Tweet in
> their API. If I report that I'm attending this symposium to LinkedIn,
> that fact is stuck in a ?roach motel,? because they have no API access
> to event data, as Dave McClure mentioned. Davis concurred that ?large
> companies have not create identifiers to make this easier at scale,?
> along the lines of Yahoo! Placemaker WOEIDs.
>
> ?ngstr??s own Salim Ismail identified a particularly trenchant problem
> with social network interoperability: ?Our identities are locked in
> walled gardens. It's impossible for me to comment about or contact
>   

This seems obvious to me: The spam hounding was inevitably going to 
drive most people from common, open email to private email with their 
groups.  I had been thinking this for a while.  MySpace was a mess, 
however Linked-In and especially Facebook have a reasonable model.  My 
main problem with it is lack of easy archiving that I get with email.  I 
already have that problem with chat systems and always have.
> someone without going through those gatekeepers. And even if I want to
> refer to someone I know on another social network, which of 18
> different contexts do I want to refer to him as??
>   

Not only that, but Facebook weirdly doesn't really make a unique 
identifier obvious.  You often connect to people with multiple 
attributes to perform a search to select the right person from a list.  
Try finding me by name...  My ID seems to be "sdwlig", but if you search 
for "sdwlig" rather than using it in the URL, you don't get me, but this 
guy is close to the top of the list:

http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=sdwlig&init=quick#/profile.php?id=1602980654&ref=search&sid=752757461.2148172085..1
Probably not me.
> Ultimately, the people in your community define what?s salient for
> you, because that?s the shared context that marks your membership in
> that community. Adam Hertz, a founder of TuneIn based their product on
> that insight: ?We believe people are the best filter, the people you
> pay attention to. We pull out all the media in your (inbox), and order
> it by popularity within your graph and, more and more, based on how
> you respond to it (your engagement).?
>   

Doesn't seem useful to me, unless it analyzes FoRK, Slashdot, etc.

Stephen




From jbone at place.org  Thu Oct 29 04:40:42 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:40:42 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] Does economics violate the laws of physics?
Message-ID: <39876A48-71B3-4D1D-988D-367DF0659839@place.org>


My apologies if this was buried somewhere in the peak coal discussion,  
I'm a bit behind.

   http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-economics-violate-th&print=true

Despite the rather sensationalist title, the article indirectly gets  
to a point I've eluded to around here for some time:  namely that  
increased productivity and technology leads to increased carrying  
capacity, and inversely that carrying capacity is *deeply* dependent  
not just on a maintained but growing productivity and technology.  And  
when that growth in both productivity and technology occurs within a  
framework of nonrenewable constraints, then what you've got is a  
race.  Either you hit "escape velocity" such that your technology gets  
you out of those renewability constraints in time or... As is more  
likely [ modulo insert singularity-generating miracle-happens-here ]  
you crash and burn in any of a number of existential risk scenarios.   
These could range from the relatively tame die-back (losing 5/6ths of  
the worlds population over several decades in this century) to real  
enders (i.e., social disruption as the previous occurs, and as  
resource wars heat up, ends up in a true instant-doomsday scenario  
that ends the species entirely or knocks a few widely-scattered  
remainders, perhaps an inviable few or at some inviable density, to  
the Stone Age --- or maybe Junk Age.)

And during this race to either lift off or crash-and-burn, the  
critical stage is the part where you're increasingly using your energy  
resources to feed your demand for energy resources.  We've entered  
this phase now;  something needs to be done, soon, to start  
dramatically increasing rather than shrinking what these guys are  
calling the "EROI."

The thermodynamics argument's a bit weak, but they apparently "get"  
the problem, which is encouraging.  Their problem is that the products  
of energy use are (or have been) themselves ultimately physical and  
thus subject to entropy, but this problem can ultimately be resolved  
by the "virtualization" of most value, by the ability to reconfigure,  
reuse, and recycle product once its *value* (not physical integrity)  
has decayed beyond a certain point, and by smarter matter.  The post- 
production societies of the US and elsewhere already demonstrate that  
there is a declining desire for / value placed on "dumb matter"  
possessions by younger generations;  give 'em a laptop and a  
reasonable place to sleep and screw, and they'll spend most of their  
time hanging out in [ insert place here, doesn't matter ] consuming  
minimal physical goods (of course the coffee beans and food have to  
come from somewhere, ultimately) but many intangible services, doing  
knowledge work, living a virtual life, and so on.  If all you need is  
a laptop and a place to sleep, the entropy factor in EROI ceases to  
dominate quite so heavily.

OTOH, w/ accelerating change curves it does mean that physical  
infrastructure is obsoleted even faster, so this is a complicating  
factor worth thinking about:  does nonlinearly accelerating  
technological change (and thus nonlinearly accelerating obsolescence)  
worsen the EROI picture all the way across the curve, or is it somehow  
balanced out at some point?  (As a corollary:  is there some other  
declining-returns factor that serves as a negative incentive for the  
participants in change acceleration to even do so in the first place?   
I.e., despite certain metrics continuing to grow, we've actually seen  
some deceleration in other key metrics over the last few years ---  
probably because investing in the next "leap" that's only going to  
give you an edge over the competition for maybe 9 months ceases to be  
profitable enough.  Cf. recent Nvidia business model changes as just  
one example.)

Rambling.  At any rate, a worthy POV.  Keeping technological humanity  
going much longer is an interesting optimization problem in many  
dimensions, and one I don't think enough people are thinking about  
across the entire n-dimensional surface.  This article does show one  
interesting slice of the space, though.


jb


From tomhiggins at gmail.com  Thu Oct 29 08:03:50 2009
From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:03:50 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] New Cory Doctorow
In-Reply-To: <692a81590910281845g78c176a3ucf40dfd8304cdba9@mail.gmail.com>
References: <692a81590910281845g78c176a3ucf40dfd8304cdba9@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e3b2914c0910290803x21b9485dgf27375fc9dc87dca@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 6:45 PM, Ken Meltsner <meltsner at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> Somewhat related to the usual talk here of IP rights, etc., Cory
> Doctorow's latest book, _Makers_., is available in a variety of
> formats, including epub for the eink crowd:
>
> http://craphound.com/makers/

I grabbed the epub just the other day, its on the stack. On the
netcast  front he is reading from a story he has just finished writing
for an upcoming self published collection of stories. It is  is called
Epoch and I think a few folks here would enjoy it, it being the tale
of a sys admin having to shut down the world first AI.  You can
acquire it from his stream at http://craphound.com/?cat=6

-tom(-)higgins

From pj at place.org  Thu Oct 29 08:19:49 2009
From: pj at place.org (Paul Jimenez)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:19:49 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] Does economics violate the laws of physics?
In-Reply-To: <39876A48-71B3-4D1D-988D-367DF0659839@place.org>
References: <39876A48-71B3-4D1D-988D-367DF0659839@place.org>
Message-ID: <4AE9B295.5000201@place.org>

Jeff Bone wrote:
> The thermodynamics argument's a bit weak, but they apparently "get" 
> the problem, which is encouraging.  Their problem is that the products 
> of energy use are (or have been) themselves ultimately physical and 
> thus subject to entropy, but this problem can ultimately be resolved 
> by the "virtualization" of most value, by the ability to reconfigure, 
> reuse, and recycle product once its *value* (not physical integrity) 
> has decayed beyond a certain point, and by smarter matter.  The 
> post-production societies of the US and elsewhere already demonstrate 
> that there is a declining desire for / value placed on "dumb matter" 
> possessions by younger generations;  give 'em a laptop and a 
> reasonable place to sleep and screw, and they'll spend most of their 
> time hanging out in [ insert place here, doesn't matter ] consuming 
> minimal physical goods (of course the coffee beans and food have to 
> come from somewhere, ultimately) but many intangible services, doing 
> knowledge work, living a virtual life, and so on.  If all you need is 
> a laptop and a place to sleep, the entropy factor in EROI ceases to 
> dominate quite so heavily.
>
Neal Stephenson called it in _Snow Crash_ : the story starts with Hiro 
living in, IIRC, a retrofitted shipping container with a net connection.

A focus switch from materialism is likely a good thing.  Encouraging 
people to think is good, right?  OTOH, with the trend towards 
spot-manufacturing, we may be looking at an embarrassment of richness in 
possible items combined with a low in desirability of said items.  So 
people will be choosier about what they own, from more choice than 
ever.  Or, if the items are made of reusable goo, perhaps it's a new 
medium for fads : hot item of the week kind of things.  But I'm way off 
topic here :)

> OTOH, w/ accelerating change curves it does mean that physical 
> infrastructure is obsoleted even faster, so this is a complicating 
> factor worth thinking about:  does nonlinearly accelerating 
> technological change (and thus nonlinearly accelerating obsolescence) 
> worsen the EROI picture all the way across the curve, or is it somehow 
> balanced out at some point?  (As a corollary:  is there some other 
> declining-returns factor that serves as a negative incentive for the 
> participants in change acceleration to even do so in the first place?  
> I.e., despite certain metrics continuing to grow, we've actually seen 
> some deceleration in other key metrics over the last few years --- 
> probably because investing in the next "leap" that's only going to 
> give you an edge over the competition for maybe 9 months ceases to be 
> profitable enough.  Cf. recent Nvidia business model changes as just 
> one example.)

Obsolescent infrastructure is a non-problem: it will be first worked 
around and eventually discarded or reused.  It could even be argued that 
technological challenges like that help drive innovation in the first 
place.  Consider all the copper in POTS lines - it's been worked around 
by moving voice calls to radio (cell phones), and reused for high 
bandwidth DSL connections.  Eventually it may be discarded entirely (by 
end users) as the radio datarates become a viable substitute.  The trend 
is clearly toward making all pipes - phone, cable, radio - carry generic 
data (TCP/IP) because this allows the services to evolve independently 
of the transport technology and vice versa. 

The declining returns worries to me seem analogous, if not identical, to 
the loss of profit when an industry transitions from specialty to 
commodity.  Someone is always willing to work a bit cheaper to try and 
make it up on volume.

> Rambling.  At any rate, a worthy POV.  Keeping technological humanity 
> going much longer is an interesting optimization problem in many 
> dimensions, and one I don't think enough people are thinking about 
> across the entire n-dimensional surface.  This article does show one 
> interesting slice of the space, though.

Indeed, thanks for the pointer!

  --pj



From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Thu Oct 29 09:55:08 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:55:08 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] Does economics violate the laws of physics?
In-Reply-To: <39876A48-71B3-4D1D-988D-367DF0659839@place.org>
Message-ID: <287656.35300.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Thu, 10/29/09, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
> 
> My apologies if this was buried somewhere in the peak coal
> discussion, I'm a bit behind.
> 
> ? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-economics-violate-th&print=true
> 
> Despite the rather sensationalist title, the article
> indirectly gets to a point I've eluded to around here for
> some time:? namely that increased productivity and
> technology leads to increased carrying capacity, and
> inversely that carrying capacity is *deeply* dependent not
> just on a maintained but growing productivity and
> technology. ...
>

It's encouraging that they "get" that energy is different and they recognize that other nonrenewable resources might have a similar attribute (potential for depletion to zero, or so low as to be no longer useful). 

But I'm still not sure they get the real problem with any form of current economics: 

   It's Population, Stupid! It's all about Carrying Capacity.

Any study of economics that ignores the fact that Planet Earth is a closed system -- a spaceship, if you will -- with the only input being sunlight is bound to fail us in the end. If it refuses to take the holistic view and ignores the fundamentals of Population and Carrying Capacity, it's useless at best and misleading at worst.

Improving technology or "productivity" simply allows us to consume, and deplete, stuff faster. And in the interim gives us a false feeling that we can somehow overcome Carrying Capacity with technology.

When you combine economies that measure success by how fast we can consume stuff with economics theories that ignore or deny that there are ultimate limits to consumption, it's a recipe for the sorts of disaster scenarios that are being floated by those who do have a holistic view of things.

While I'm encouraged that these folks have decided to differentiate energy as an economic input and treat it differently, one bit of evidence about how limited their thinking continues to be is their comment that conservation is useless because "a gallon of gasoline not burned by an American will be burned by someone else anyway". 

That suggests to me they are oblivious to carrying capacity as an absolute limit. I'm not sure if they have chosen to ignore it or deny it. The article is not clear in this regard. 

If you accept that the planet has an absolute limit to its carrying capacity, conservation is the ONLY thing that works. Conservation through each of us using less as well as, ultimately, through fewer of us using it.

While it's inclusion is a big improvement over neoclassical economics, in the end, Energy Return On Investment (EROI) is simply a direct measure of how deep down the depletion curve we can push ourselves and an indirect measure of how rapidly we are pushing towards the limits of the carrying capacity of the planet.

In my view.

Jeff, I've frequently heard arguments like yours that "... increased productivity and technology leads to increased carrying capacity". I've never been able to suss it myself and I've not seen an explanation that made sense to me in the larger context of planetary carrying capacity.

I would be interested in a lucid, plain language explanation from someone who believes otherwise: that technology can somehow overcome what I believe is the absolute limit of planetary carrying capacity rather than simply helping us reach that limit ever faster. Is there some simple principle involved here that I'm overlooking?

I would also be interested if, and how, it can do so without reducing both population and consumption.

          ...ken...


      __________________________________________________________________
Connect with friends from any web browser - no download required. Try the new Yahoo! Canada Messenger for the Web BETA at http://ca.messenger.yahoo.com/webmessengerpromo.php


From russell.turpin at gmail.com  Thu Oct 29 10:07:32 2009
From: russell.turpin at gmail.com (Russell Turpin)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:07:32 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] Does economics violate the laws of physics?
In-Reply-To: <287656.35300.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <39876A48-71B3-4D1D-988D-367DF0659839@place.org>
	<287656.35300.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <dbc0ed610910291007k126be6f7lafd207e0efc22773@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo
<ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> It's encouraging that they "get" that energy is different and they recognize that
> other nonrenewable resources might have a similar attribute (potential for
> depletion to zero, or so low as to be no longer useful). But I'm still not sure
> they get the real problem with any form of current economics:
>
> ? It's Population, Stupid! It's all about Carrying Capacity.

Economic growth in the past has enabled an increase in carrying
capacity. That's not the same as saying a) that economic growth always
will do so, or b) that economic growth requires an increase in
population. Europe and Japan are both experiencing population
declines. Where that causes economic problems has mostly to do with
demographics, and especially with regard to pension programs that
failed to take into account such demographic change.

I suspect economic growth in the future may be expressed in quite
different physical form than it has in the past. It's important to
remember that neither money nor utility are measured in BTUs or long
tonnes.


From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Thu Oct 29 10:56:12 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:56:12 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] Does economics violate the laws of physics?
In-Reply-To: <dbc0ed610910291007k126be6f7lafd207e0efc22773@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <261520.76435.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Thu, 10/29/09, Russell Turpin <russell.turpin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Ken
> Ganshirt @ Yahoo
> <ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca>
> wrote:
> > It's encouraging that they "get" that energy is
> > different and they recognize that
> > other nonrenewable resources might have a similar
> > attribute (potential for
> > depletion to zero, or so low as to be no longer
> > useful). But I'm still not sure
> > they get the real problem with any form of current
> > economics:
> >
> > ? It's Population, Stupid! It's all about Carrying
> > Capacity.
> 
> Economic growth in the past has enabled an increase in
> carrying capacity. 
>

It's statements like that which make me think there's something fundamental I'm not getting. How can economic growth increase carrying capacity?

The measurement for economic "growth" is essentially a measure of consumption.

So how does increasing consumption increase planetary carrying capacity? It's a counterintuitive concept that my brain doesn't seem able to grasp. What's the missing piece?

 ...ken...


      __________________________________________________________________
Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr! 

http://www.flickr.com/gift/


From jbone at place.org  Thu Oct 29 11:07:44 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:07:44 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] [tt]  Does economics violate the laws of physics?
In-Reply-To: <20091029170021.GU17686@leitl.org>
References: <20091029170021.GU17686@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <F68699CA-95D3-4F26-B814-A2F33E3847E3@place.org>


Ken asks:

> Jeff, I've frequently heard arguments like yours that "... increased  
> productivity and technology leads to increased carrying capacity".  
> I've never been able to suss it myself and I've not seen an  
> explanation that made sense to me in the larger context of planetary  
> carrying capacity.

Consider the increase in mean food output per farmed acre over the  
last few centuries as a function of agricultural technology including  
fertilizer, smarter cultivation processes, industrial-grade  
productivity in harvesting and planting that compress cycles.  All of  
this squeeze more and bigger harvests out of a single unit of time /  
space.  Consider the increase in the amount of practically-farmable  
land due to technological progress in cost-effective water transport  
and storage, irrigation efficiency, etc.  Etc.  Examples abound;   
surely this is clear?  Low-tech = low-efficiency use of a unit  
resource.  Better-tech = more-efficient use of a unit resource = said  
unit resource supports more people.

(This is a bit simplistic.  Basically, everything that's happened on  
this planet since the advent of life has been just a constant  
reconfiguration of more or less the same set of atoms, with ample  
energy input.  There's a time dimension to it, etc.  But in terms of  
human population growth, the only curve it even closely approximates  
is the "planetary computational capacity" curve --- and that's running  
ahead of it even as we run out of the energy necessary to kick the can  
a little further down the road.  Critical moment approaching...)

> I would be interested in a lucid, plain language explanation from  
> someone who believes otherwise: that technology can somehow overcome  
> what I believe is the absolute limit of planetary carrying capacity  
> rather than simply helping us reach that limit ever faster. Is there  
> some simple principle involved here that I'm overlooking?

Now there's a fundamentally different, and interesting, question.

Physics, of course, ultimately provides some significant constraints  
on what is (or is not) achievable in terms of "carrying capacity" of  
this planet (or any assemblage of time, space, matter, energy.)   
There's always going to be some kind of race between number of  
individuals, resource needs of each individual, and resources  
available.  At the end of the line, it's all physical laws.

Ultimately, "carrying capacity" could be considered as equivalent to  
"computational capacity."  (Or, really, a function that maps some  
configuration of time, space, matter and energy to some measure of  
computational capacity.  Now optimize. ;-)

But the speculative technologies of upload, computronium, and getting  
off-planet give us a lot more runway --- if we get there before an  
energy-crunch induced civilization fail.  And if Tipler's right (which  
appears unlikely right now vis-a-vis cosmological constant) you might,  
*might* even be able to eventually engineer subjective infinite time  
for all possible conscious entities at the end of the universe.  But  
there are solutions that don't get all the way there that are  
nonetheless VASTLY better than the present risk profile.

Cf. Feynman, Seth Lloyd, and many others re: physical limits of  
computation.



jb


From russell.turpin at gmail.com  Thu Oct 29 11:10:56 2009
From: russell.turpin at gmail.com (Russell Turpin)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:10:56 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] Does economics violate the laws of physics?
In-Reply-To: <261520.76435.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <dbc0ed610910291007k126be6f7lafd207e0efc22773@mail.gmail.com>
	<261520.76435.qm@web33005.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <dbc0ed610910291110w120a9c15k9e4b44b373e06662@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo
<ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> It's statements like that which make me think there's something fundamental
> I'm not getting. How can economic growth increase carrying capacity?

Carrying capacity living as hunters and gatherers is different from
carrying capacity with the produce from primitive agriculture, which
is different from carrying capacity with the produce from modern
agriculture. I agree there's a limit to how much technology can
increase carrying capacity. But economic growth doesn't have to be
bent to increasing the population.

> The measurement for economic "growth" is essentially a measure of consumption.

Consumption requires production. Even hunters and gatherers have to
hunt and gather.

From tomhiggins at gmail.com  Thu Oct 29 12:45:16 2009
From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:45:16 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] [tt] Does economics violate the laws of physics?
In-Reply-To: <F68699CA-95D3-4F26-B814-A2F33E3847E3@place.org>
References: <20091029170021.GU17686@leitl.org>
	<F68699CA-95D3-4F26-B814-A2F33E3847E3@place.org>
Message-ID: <e3b2914c0910291245v57590460l9b057603e74bcffb@mail.gmail.com>

n Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
>
>
> Consider the increase in mean food output per farmed acre over the last few
> centuries as a function of agricultural technology including fertilizer,
> smarter cultivation processes, industrial-grade productivity in harvesting
> and planting that compress cycles. ?All of this squeeze more and bigger
> harvests out of a single unit of time / space. ?Consider the increase in the
> amount of practically-farmable land due to technological progress in
> cost-effective water transport and storage, irrigation efficiency, etc.
> ?Etc. ?Examples abound; ?surely this is clear? ?Low-tech = low-efficiency
> use of a unit resource. ?Better-tech = more-efficient use of a unit resource
> = said unit resource supports more people.


Are you factoring the wear on that time/space of growable land/sea
the increased use and compressed cycles might cause? "Better" tech may
not not always be a long term betterment for utilization.


-tom(just a thought, not a counter argument in any manner)higgins


From eugen at leitl.org  Thu Oct 29 13:12:03 2009
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:12:03 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] New threat for UK's offshore havens: tax
Message-ID: <20091029201203.GQ17686@leitl.org>

----- Forwarded message from "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com> -----

From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:29:57 -0400
To: Gold Silver Crypto <gold-silver-crypto at rayservers.com>,
	cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
Subject: New threat for UK's offshore havens: tax
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.936)

You can run, but you can't hide.

But you knew that already, right?

Right?

(This thing even on anymore?)

Cheers,
RAH
-------

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/28/tax-more-tax-havens-told/print
>

The Guardian


New threat for UK's offshore havens: tax
Nick Mathiason
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 October 2009 21.59 GMT


A Treasury report will ask overseas territories and crown dependencies
to raise taxes. Photograph: Cate Gillon/Getty

Britain's tax havens will be read the last rites tomorrow when a
Treasury commissioned report will tell them to raise new taxes if they
are to survive the economic crisis.

Amid fears that Britain may have to bail out tax havens which are
showing signs of financial stress, the government will publish the
findings of an economic healthcheck of its overseas territories and
crown dependencies including Jersey, the Isle of Man and the Cayman
islands.

Having spent the last 20 years luring the world's super-rich and top
companies to their shores, Britain's offshore centres will be told
they have no excuse not to diversify their tax bases to ward off
financial crisis.

Sir Michael Foot, a former Bank of England official and Bahamas bank
inspector, will demand that island paradises must take greater
responsibility for their economic futures. He is likely to emphasise
that offshore jurisdictions will have no one to blame but themselves
if they get into financial difficulties. Foot is also expected to say
they have no excuse not to abide by anti-money laundering and counter-
terrorism finance benchmarks.

It is understood the government has particular concerns over the
ability of Anguilla and Montserrat to ride out the economic storm. The
Caribbean islands have been affected by the decline in financial
services and US tourism.

In the event of further economic deterioration, certain Caribbean
islands could become failed states and be dragged into the illegal
drugs trade, Whitehall insiders have said recently.

Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are all UK crown dependencies.
Britain's 14 overseas territories include Bermuda, the Caymans,
Gibraltar and the British Virgin islands. It is thought Foot believes
the crown dependencies have taken significant steps to abide by
international regulations. But there is concern that moves to reduce
all three islands' corporation tax to zero may breach European tax
protocols.

Earlier this month the Treasury slashed the Isle of Man's budget by
#140m after it discovered a 400-year revenue sharing agreement was
weighted sharply in the tax haven's favour. The cut was equivalent to
a 24% budget reduction. The 80,000-strong island faces steep spending
cuts and possible higher taxes.

Similarly, the Caymans have also faced a financial crisis after a
public spending programme and reduced fees from banks meant it was
forced to beg the Foreign Office for permission to raise a #280m bank
loan. Chris Bryant, the Foreign Office minister, refused until the
islands' leaders convinced him they had a financial plan.

For tax havens that spent tens of millions in attracting international
business, the fall from grace has been swift as the opaque nature of
their finances has led to world leaders blaming them for helping to
destabilise the financial system.

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Thu Oct 29 23:11:42 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:11:42 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] [tt]  Does economics violate the laws of physics?
Message-ID: <997959.12426.qm@web33004.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

[Wind warning] Caution: if you are only marginally interested in the subject the following is rather long and potentially boring so you might wish to push the "Next" button on your reader. Unless you are looking for a non-addictive sleeping soporific. [/warning]

--- On Thu, 10/29/09, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
> 
> Ken asks:
> 
> > Jeff, I've frequently heard arguments like yours that
> > "... increased productivity and technology leads to
> > increased carrying capacity". I've never been able to suss
> > it myself and I've not seen an explanation that made sense
> > to me in the larger context of planetary carrying capacity.
> 
> Consider the increase in mean food output per farmed acre over the 
> last few centuries as a function of agricultural technology including
> fertilizer, smarter cultivation processes, industrial-grade productivity
> in harvesting and planting that compress cycles.? All of this squeeze
> more and bigger harvests out of a single unit of time / space.? Consider
> the increase in the amount of practically-farmable land due to
> technological progress in cost-effective water transport and storage,
> irrigation efficiency, etc.? Etc.? Examples abound;? surely this is
> clear?? 



In a word: No.

This is the same basic argument I've read every time I encounter an attempt to articulate how carrying capacity is "increased" by the use of technology. It just doesn't compute for me. 

I suppose if you have a sufficiently narrow view of "carrying capacity" and look at one teensy patch of dirt I can see how one might think they've increased its carrying capacity.

But please note that my question includes the qualifier: "in the larger context of planetary carrying capacity."

Here's the problem I continue to have with that explanation: 

I can use the same "proof" to show that with the addition of some water, a few chemicals, some seeds, some energy and hydroponics technology I can increase the carrying capacity of a plastic tray.

The explanation you offer does not describe how to increase the carrying capacity of anything. It's a *recipe* of how to assemble and combine a number of necessary ingredients with dirt to produce edible stuff. It's the same as saying that your mother's angel cake recipe tells how to increase the carrying capacity of the cake pan.

This is no exaggeration when you consider that intensive farming has rendered much of our soil into a nearly sterile growing medium that requires the manual addition of everything in order to grow anything. With "modern" "high-tech" "hyper-efficient" intensive farming practises, the dirt has little more function than a hydroponics tray.

In the example you offer, you are not getting "more" out of that patch of dirt. You are ADDING to it a number of inputs that are, essentially, equivalent to what you later harvest from it. 

When you add fertilizers you remove them? from some other use. When you use the energy to produce the fertilizers and till the land you remove it from some other use. When you use water to artificially irrigate you remove it from some other use. 

And in all cases we render some portion of the inputs permanently unusable for anything further. 

In doing so, we reduce the carrying capacity of the planet by a similar quantity. I think.



>
> Low-tech = low-efficiency use of a unit resource.? Better-tech = more-
> efficient use of a unit resource = said unit resource supports more
> people.
>


Incomplete equation: "said unit resource..." *PLUS ALL THE ADDED INPUTS* "...supports more people."

It's not the "Better-tech"; it's the energy used in the application of that better-tech, plus whatever other additional inputs the "Better-tech" recipe calls for, that enables the increased output.

said standard resource + added inputs + recipe = increased output(s).

In the proffered example and its many standard variants, the said unit resource becomes just one ingredient or utensil in the better-tech recipe.

What you call "more-efficient use" isn't, necessarily. "More-efficient use" in this context is shorthand for decisions to apply the necessary additional inputs to this particular use rather than some other use, in the manner described by the Better-tech recipe.

This is not necessarily more efficient use of the standard resource. One needs to define the parameters and quantify them to support this contention. Nor is it necessarily more efficient use of the additional inputs that have been diverted to this use. Again, what are the parameters and quantification used to measure and declare it more "efficient".

Eg. More efficient than What, by How Many of Which units?

Yeah, I know I'm supposed to take it on faith that feeding more people is a Better use of the standard resource and all the additional inputs in the proffered example than any other possible use we might choose to put them to. But even if I buy that, it's a completely different (faith-based) argument than "more-efficient" use of them.



> 
> (This is a bit simplistic.? Basically, everything
> that's happened on this planet since the advent of life has
> been just a constant reconfiguration of more or less the
> same set of atoms, with ample energy input.? 
>


Just so. I'm surprised that, when you understand that, you can say technology increases carrying capacity. Technology simply helps us understand various ways to rearrange stuff. 

Some have referred to it -- in the context of planetary carrying capacity -- as "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic". I remain uncommitted and still a little confused but the more I study the issues the more I'm sympathizing with at least the spirit of this interpretation.


> 
> > I would be interested in a lucid, plain language
> > explanation from someone who believes otherwise: that
> > technology can somehow overcome what I believe is the
> > absolute limit of planetary carrying capacity rather than
> > simply helping us reach that limit ever faster. Is there
> > some simple principle involved here that I'm overlooking?
> 
> Now there's a fundamentally different, and interesting,
> question.
> 


But it's not a different question. It's the same question. I apologize if asking it a couple of slightly different ways caused some confusion. 

I am only able to view carrying capacity in a planetary sense. A failing, I know, but in the context of discussions like this it seems the only sense that matters. Any narrower slice ends up in a discussion of what appears to be simply ways to rearrange things ... different recipes for how to use various inputs to produce different-but-equivalent outputs. Most of those recipes involve some depletion of (rendering permanently unusable) what I view as ultimately a finite resource: the planet.

How do you view this statement? "'Increasing' productivity is simply an exercise in substitution." 

(Yes, I think it's relevant to the discussion because some variant of "increased productivity of unit resources" always crops up in these discussions.)

? ? ? ? ???...ken...





      __________________________________________________________________
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http://www.flickr.com/gift/


From beberg at mithral.com  Fri Oct 30 02:49:31 2009
From: beberg at mithral.com (Adam L Beberg)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:49:31 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] New threat for UK's offshore havens: tax
In-Reply-To: <20091029201203.GQ17686@leitl.org>
References: <20091029201203.GQ17686@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <4AEAB6AB.2090306@mithral.com>

Eugen Leitl wrote on 10/29/2009 1:12 PM:
> You can run, but you can't hide.
> 
> But you knew that already, right?
> 
> Right?

The UK is broke, no more free ride in the territories. This isn't about 
stopping the rich from hiding their money which is the primary function 
of government. For the middle class tho...

They are now opening up ALL safety deposit boxes over there, and taking 
whatever they want, until you can prove it's yours - which you cannot 
obviously. How convenient. 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1222777/The-raid-rocked-Met-Why-gun-drugs-op-6-717-safety-deposit-boxes-cost-taxpayer-fortune.html

Not as bad as what they do in California, but then again keeping your 
family jewels in a building that is controlled by those that will do 
anything to maintain power, isn't such a great idea is it.

When the drug dealer and other underground economy workers are the only 
ones left that have jobs, you have to do whatever is necessary to get 
your cut if taxes don't work, right? It's always the tax evasion that 
they get you for, because that is THEIR money you're not paying.

The governments are broke, and those government jobs all still need to 
get paid, so now we have entered the kleptocracy phase where they take 
stuff and print money exponentially.

Fun times, fun times...

-- 
Adam L. Beberg
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/

From jbone at place.org  Fri Oct 30 05:09:13 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:09:13 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] economics / carrying capacity
Message-ID: <BCADDAA4-B0FF-4DC6-9DAE-129362E0EA3D@place.org>


Ken:

> In a word: No. This is the same basic argument I've read every time  
> I encounter an attempt to articulate how carrying capacity is  
> "increased" by the use of technology. It just doesn't compute for  
> me. I suppose if you have a sufficiently narrow view of "carrying  
> capacity" and look at one teensy patch of dirt I can see how one  
> might think they've increased its carrying capacity. But please note  
> that my question includes the qualifier: "in the larger context of  
> planetary carrying capacity." Here's the problem I continue to have  
> with that explanation: I can use the same "proof" to show that with  
> the addition of some water, a few chemicals, some seeds, some energy  
> and hydroponics technology I can increase the carrying capacity of a  
> plastic tray. The explanation you offer does not describe how to  
> increase the carrying capacity of anything. It's a *recipe* of how  
> to assemble and combine a number of necessary ingredients with dirt  
> to produce edible stuff. It's the same as saying that your mother's  
> angel cake recipe tells how to increase the carrying capacity of the  
> cake pan. This is no exaggeration when you consider that intensive  
> farming has rendered much of our soil into a nearly sterile growing  
> medium that requires the manual addition of everything in order to  
> grow anything. With "modern" "high-tech" "hyper-efficient" intensive  
> farming practises, the dirt has little more function than a  
> hydroponics tray. In the example you offer, you are not getting  
> "more" out of that patch of dirt. You are ADDING to it a number of  
> inputs that are, essentially, equivalent to what you later harvest  
> from it. When you add fertilizers you remove them  from some other  
> use. When you use the energy to produce the fertilizers and till the  
> land you remove it from some other use. When you use water to  
> artificially irrigate you remove it from some other use. And in all  
> cases we render some portion of the inputs permanently unusable for  
> anything further. In doing so, we reduce the carrying capacity of  
> the planet by a similar quantity. I think.

Actually Ken, I think we're more or less in violent agreement here,  
with some caveats.  We're agreeing on some general principles, but  
you're missing the implications.  Let me explain.

Yes indeed, you can increase the carrying capacity (at a moment in  
time) of a plastic tray with the addition of some external inputs and  
a little bit of tech.

As I stated before, the notion of "carrying capacity" is rather  
simplistic without the addition of some notion of a resource base and  
some temporal constraints.  In absolute terms, you are correct:   
"technological" means of increasing carrying capacity *at a point in  
time,* or for some *interval of time*, is really a process of  
reconfiguring readily-available resources in order to support a  
greater population.  In fact, that's as good a definition of  
technology as any:  it is the tools, methods, processes, and know-how  
that can be employed by a population to either increase its size or  
improve the "quality of life" for its constituents, given some amount  
of resources, for some period of time.  So total future carry is a  
strict function of a fixed amount of resources, some fixed notion of  
time, and some fixed level of technology.

You are correct that in an absolute sense the total amount of  
"resources" available here on this planet is more or less "fixed" and  
has been (and will be) for the duration of the human species' tenure.   
And yes, most present technology results in the increased consumption  
of resources with decreasing ability to reuse those resources.  Right  
now our technology *undeniably* supports more people on the planet  
than our lower-tech antecedents could, at the expense of making the  
window of sustainability at this technology level much shorter.

Here's where I think our viewpoints diverge slightly.  First, the  
"larger context" you speak of assumes a couple of things explicitly:   
first, a planetary context;  second, a general process by which  
resources are "rendered...  permanently unusable for anything  
further."  And finally, you seem to assume a more-or-less status quo  
interpretation of what kind of existence (corporeal) the population of  
interest must have.

 From my own perspective, the larger context is in the long-term ---  
potentially post-planetary, certainly post-corporeal --- survival of  
humanity and successors at higher tech levels.  Lots of futurists and  
sci-fi types tend to like to talk about "post-scarcity economics" ---  
and I think they miss the fundamental point right in front of their  
faces.  *Every* increase in technology seems to come with increased  
resource demands attendant to quality-of-life-increase expectations.   
"Post-scarcity economics" is only meaningful if you assume that you  
can and do get to an increased tech level that more effectively uses  
(and reuses) available resources to maintain a more-or-less static  
population, static quality-of-life, or something similar.  And those  
quantities --- population and quality of life --- always increase as  
technology increases, straining the resource base even further, in a  
limit process bounded by physics and physical quantities.  Unless you  
*actually* increase the resources available, at any given point a  
fixed amount of resources implies a fixed population / fixed total  
amount of quality-of-life at a given technology level.  The hard limit  
there is defined by physics;  there's some optimal arrangement of  
matter and processes (technological ecology, if you will) that  
supports life --- i.e., imagine a totally-virtualized population  
living in an optimal computer that uses / reuses all available atoms,  
i.e. "computronium."  At that point, the constraints involve mass,  
energy, time, and so on to determine total aggregate quality and  
quantity of life.  Nothing else is really an input at that point;  if  
you want to increase total aggregate quanlity and quantity of life,  
you need more of at least one of those fundamental physical quantities.

Re; reusablility:  nothing we're doing on this planet at present  
renders any matter "permanently unusable for anything further."   
Matter isn't used up, it just gets used in such a way that it requires  
greater amounts of energy and know-how to reuse.  The problem we face  
is that present processes and most top-down technological processes  
render raw materials harder and harder to reuse.  But other  
speculative mechanisms, particularly molecular nanotechnology, will  
allow for us to see atoms in the most basic economic sense as  
resources to be used / configured / reconfigured / reused basically at  
will, given adequate energy inputs to do so.  (Where the energy comes  
from is another discussion entirely.

Just some thoughts.  I do understand your point;  please understand  
that I'm not suggesting that technology is a panacea.  It's merely a  
means of raising the "energy state" (if you will) of the dynamic  
equilibrium between amount and quality of life over some resource  
base.  *That's* what carrying capacity means in a higher future "shock  
level" context.

jb


From jbone at place.org  Fri Oct 30 05:26:04 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:26:04 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] Fermi paradox was re: economics / carrying capacity
In-Reply-To: <BCADDAA4-B0FF-4DC6-9DAE-129362E0EA3D@place.org>
References: <BCADDAA4-B0FF-4DC6-9DAE-129362E0EA3D@place.org>
Message-ID: <324AAE2A-398C-44B3-A8B8-84BF376C45BB@place.org>


One addendum to this discussion:

I think there's a reasonable if small chance that the implications  
lurking in this present chain of discussion explain the Fermi paradox  
in a couple of ways.  It could imply the long-term inviability of  
technological civilization due to fundamental race conditions  
involving resource economics.  It could also imply that most advanced  
intelligences eventually realize and understand the limits and  
constraints on growth processes such that they come to terms with one  
or more of the fundamental constraints involved, and adapt accordingly  
in some manner that bounds growth and resource consumption (thereby  
limiting their detectable "footprint" on the universe.)

At some point, perhaps, ethics and physics are aspects of the same  
thing. :-)

I do rather doubt it, though.


jb


From eugen at leitl.org  Fri Oct 30 05:56:34 2009
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:56:34 +0100
Subject: [FoRK] Fermi paradox was re: economics / carrying capacity
In-Reply-To: <324AAE2A-398C-44B3-A8B8-84BF376C45BB@place.org>
References: <BCADDAA4-B0FF-4DC6-9DAE-129362E0EA3D@place.org>
	<324AAE2A-398C-44B3-A8B8-84BF376C45BB@place.org>
Message-ID: <20091030125634.GV17686@leitl.org>

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 07:26:04AM -0500, Jeff Bone wrote:

> I think there's a reasonable if small chance that the implications  
> lurking in this present chain of discussion explain the Fermi paradox  
> in a couple of ways.  It could imply the long-term inviability of  
> technological civilization due to fundamental race conditions  
> involving resource economics.  It could also imply that most advanced  

This doesn't strike me as terribly likely, from statistical reasoning
alone.

> intelligences eventually realize and understand the limits and  
> constraints on growth processes such that they come to terms with one  
> or more of the fundamental constraints involved, and adapt accordingly  
> in some manner that bounds growth and resource consumption (thereby  
> limiting their detectable "footprint" on the universe.)

You don't need a lot of km^3 of rocks to darken a star,
or to turn it into a FIR blackbody. 
 
> At some point, perhaps, ethics and physics are aspects of the same  
> thing. :-)

Darwin will tend to take a dim view of long-term stability of
self-limiting behaviour, whatever its origins.
 
> I do rather doubt it, though.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

From jbone at place.org  Fri Oct 30 06:07:57 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:07:57 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] Large changes in fiscal policy:  taxes versus spending
Message-ID: <AAC91AFD-A19E-47BB-8ED3-BC99BF240B17@place.org>


Short version:  if you want economic growth, cut taxes and reduce  
spending, particularly deficit spending.

Via EconLog...  from Harvard, no less (wonders never cease...)

   http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/files/Large%2Bchanges%2Bin%2Bfiscal%2Bpolicy_October_2009.pdf

jb


From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Fri Oct 30 09:15:40 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:15:40 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] Large changes in fiscal policy:  taxes versus spending
In-Reply-To: <AAC91AFD-A19E-47BB-8ED3-BC99BF240B17@place.org>
Message-ID: <235759.59377.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Fri, 10/30/09, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:

> 
> Short version:? if you want economic growth, cut taxes
> and reduce spending, particularly deficit spending.
> 
> Via EconLog...? from Harvard, no less (wonders never
> cease...)
> 
> ? http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/files/Large%2Bchanges%2Bin%2Bfiscal%2Bpolicy_October_2009.pdf
> 
> jb
> 

Interesting. But I'm still not onside with the great desire for economic growth as it is currently defined, practiced and measured == ever-increasing consumption. 

I don't understand why this is seen as a Good Thing. ???

 ...ken... <ever puzzled by "conventional wisdom">


      __________________________________________________________________
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From sdw at lig.net  Fri Oct 30 10:27:10 2009
From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:27:10 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] Large changes in fiscal policy:  taxes versus spending
In-Reply-To: <235759.59377.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <235759.59377.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4AEB21EE.5050503@lig.net>

Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo wrote:
> --- On Fri, 10/30/09, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> Short version:  if you want economic growth, cut taxes
>> and reduce spending, particularly deficit spending.
>>
>> Via EconLog...  from Harvard, no less (wonders never
>> cease...)
>>
>>   http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/files/Large%2Bchanges%2Bin%2Bfiscal%2Bpolicy_October_2009.pdf
>>
>> jb
>>
>>     
>
> Interesting. But I'm still not onside with the great desire for economic growth as it is currently defined, practiced and measured == ever-increasing consumption. 
>   

I agree.  While it is great that valuable goods evolve quickly and drop 
drastically in price, quality of life in various measures ought to be 
more of a direct optimization goal.  By that measure, some index should 
have shown a huge spike since the growth and maturity of the Internet, 
for instance.  Various improvements in food distribution in terms of 
variety, freshness, and quality.  People on the coasts may not notice 
much change, but a typical grocery store in Ohio 30 years ago would be 
depressing to many here on the list.  The question is: Have those 
improved directly or as a side effect of a consumption-based focus?  
Could better measure and feedback of utility have done much better?  I 
think it works sometimes, and works against sometimes.

sdw
> I don't understand why this is seen as a Good Thing. ???
>
>  ...ken... <ever puzzled by "conventional wisdom">
>
>
>   


From jbone at place.org  Fri Oct 30 10:52:41 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:52:41 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] Large changes in fiscal policy:  taxes versus spending
In-Reply-To: <AAC91AFD-A19E-47BB-8ED3-BC99BF240B17@place.org>
References: <AAC91AFD-A19E-47BB-8ED3-BC99BF240B17@place.org>
Message-ID: <2C344777-201B-4466-B3D0-4D4DDB939633@place.org>


Ken says:

> Interesting. But I'm still not onside with the great desire for  
> economic growth as it is currently defined, practiced and measured  
> == ever-increasing consumption. I don't understand why this is seen  
> as a Good Thing. ???

Not making any value judgments in the previous.

But apropos the previous carrying capacity argument, it seems that  
we're a bit "half pregnant."  To mix metaphors here, it seems  
inevitable that there are two options:  forge on at high speed, hoping  
that we hit escape velocity -- and accept *those* attendant  
existential risks and attempt to maintain acceleration while  
mitigating them;  or fall back in tech level and take *those*  
inevitable die-back / extinction risks.  Clowns to the left, jokers to  
the right...

The discussion, though, is a bit futile.  While those are the two  
hypothetical extrema --- and maintenance of status quo seems out of  
the question --- there seems like only one practical course of action  
at this point in historical path-dependency.  Reminds me a bit of Doug  
Adams' forward to HHGTTG:

> Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the  
> Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
>
> Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is  
> an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- 
> descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still  
> think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
>
> This planet has ? or rather had ? a problem, which was this: most of  
> the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  
> Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these  
> were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of  
> paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green  
> pieces of paper that were unhappy.
>
> And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most  
> of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
>

And the money shot, apropos this discussion:

> Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big  
> mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some  
> said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should  
> ever have left the oceans.
>

Now, I will make a value judgment:  frankly I don't care if we  
alt.pave.the.earth, so long as in doing so we get some form of human- 
derived intelligence wave-front spreading outward first.

$0.02, YMMV.

jb



From russell.turpin at gmail.com  Fri Oct 30 11:04:40 2009
From: russell.turpin at gmail.com (Russell Turpin)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:04:40 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] [tt] Does economics violate the laws of physics?
In-Reply-To: <997959.12426.qm@web33004.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <997959.12426.qm@web33004.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <dbc0ed610910301104t15ff1f80t94fbaf3f1aac9a56@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo
<ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> The explanation you offer does not describe how to increase the carrying
> capacity of anything. It's a *recipe* of how to assemble and combine a
> number of necessary ingredients with dirt to produce edible stuff. ...

What is technology but a set of recipes? Plop a bunch of American
software engineers down in the Kalihari desert, and soon they would
all starve to death. Its carrying capacity for them is zero. The !Kung
have been living there for untold millennia, quite well, because they
have developed a technology for that. Sustainable carrying capacity is
a function of technology as well as of the resource base. Now, yes,
physics says that there is a maximum, independent of technology. I
suspect that maximum is quite far away a) from what is possible given
current and soon-to-be technologies, or b) from what I'd like to see,
given that I have more hopes for coming generations than that they
would just multiply themselves to maximally sustainable numbers.

From khare at alumni.caltech.edu  Fri Oct 30 11:48:01 2009
From: khare at alumni.caltech.edu (khare at alumni.caltech.edu)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:48:01 +0000
Subject: [FoRK] [Slate] Manual transmission?! I don't like manual *steering*!
Message-ID: <1852283268-1256928482-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1265654208-@bda043.bisx.prod.on.blackberry>

I must say, I only bought a Prius because it was the only Clunkers-qualifed replacement car with Radar cruise control we could get. 

I fell in love with that feature on our Cadillac XLR, where it was incidental to my decision at the time. Now, I won't let anyone in my extended family buy a car without it! 

This time, I didn't pay much attention to the LKA feature on the Prius options package, and I have something new that amazes me every day: automatic steering.

Yes, at highway speeds with clear lane markers, it will follow curves and exits! It's a great feeling while talking, tuning the radio or checking navigation to know there are more "eyes on the road".

And the self-parking feature rocks, too :)

Best,
  Rohit 

http://mobile.slate.com/rss.jsp?rssid=411&item=http%3a%2f%2fwww.slate.com%2fdefault.aspx%3fdisplaymode%3d201%26id%3d2234069%26device%3drss+++++++++&cid=-1

 A freeway autopilot would have to keep you in your lane until your exit. It wouldn't zip around from lane to lane like a jerk. But I'm guessing most of us could live with that.

How farfetched is this idea? Consider what Lexus is already selling:Lane Keeping Assist, an intelligent system which can lessen the burden of steering. This system uses a stereo imaging camera to monitor white line road markings (subject to weather, climate and road conditions). Lane Keeping Assist offers two functions: [1] Lane Departure Warning: If the possibility of inadvertent lane departure is detected, the system provides an audio-visual warning and applies a brief corrective steering force. [2] Lane Keep: This can provide additional steering torque to help the driver apply the appropriate steering input to keep the vehicle within the lane.

So we're already beginning to automate driving in a manner similar to flying. Automation won't make humans pay attention to alerts telling them to retake control of their vehicles; that's our job, and it's why the Federal Aviation Administration was right to strip the Northwest pilots of their licenses. But if humans pay enough attention to step in when computers or other humans tell them to do so, there's no reason why computers can't do more of the driving. Then, perhaps, we could do what LaHood says we can't do: talk, text, and check our laptops at the wheel without putting anyone at risk.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T


From wgstoddard at gmail.com  Fri Oct 30 11:48:13 2009
From: wgstoddard at gmail.com (Bill Stoddard)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:48:13 -0400
Subject: [FoRK] The case for deflation
Message-ID: <4AEB34ED.2070603@gmail.com>



http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5917

From rkhare at gmail.com  Fri Oct 30 11:50:44 2009
From: rkhare at gmail.com (Rohit Khare)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:50:44 +0000
Subject: [FoRK] [LATimes] Dan Neil review of HS250h
Message-ID: <1086181672-1256928644-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-526491351-@bda043.bisx.prod.on.blackberry>

Speaking of radar and LKA, here's another gem that reminds my why Dan Neil has more Pulitzer prizes than I do! :) --Rohit

"Find me a person who thinks this luxury hybrid is beautiful and I'll find you someone who has a plaid La-Z-Boy in the family room."

"This narrow, graceless, cosmically unlovely economy car -- which is not sold in the U.S. because it fails the ugly-car clause of various trade agreements -- crushes any desire I might have to own an HS250h."
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

-----Original Message-----
From: Smruti Vidwans <smruti at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:03:58 
To: Rohit Khare<rkhare at gmail.com>
Subject: Dan Neil review of HS250h- Oy

<http://ad.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/38d6/7/2c0/%2a/o%3B218533129%3B6-0%3B0%3B41255470%3B3454-728/90%3B33592479/33610357/1%3B%3B%7Efdr%3D218516249%3B0-0%3B0%3B38002800%3B3454-728/90%3B33583338/33601216/1%3Bu%3Dhttp%3A//www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-neil30-2009oct30%2C0%2C3315693.column%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttp://ad.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/38d6/3/0/%2a/i%3B218520458%3B0-0%3B0%3B16726208%3B3454-728/90%3B33587291/33605169/1%3Bu%3Dhttp%3A//www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-neil30-2009oct30%2C0%2C3315693.column%3B%7Eokv%3D%3Bdc_slot%3D4342%3B%3B%7Eaopt%3D2/ff/ff/ff%3B%7Efdr%3D194495282%3B0-0%3B0%3B12926622%3B3454-728/90%3B25326828/25344685/1%3Bu%3Dhttp%3A//www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-neil30-2009oct30%2C0%2C3315693.column%3B%7Eokv%3D%3Brs%3D10034%3Brs%3D10070%3Bptype%3Ds%3Bslug%3Dla-fi-neil30-2009oct30%3Brg%3Dur%3Bref%3Dlatimescom%3Bpos%3DT%3Bdcopt%3Dist%3Bsz%3D728x90%3Btile%3D1%3Bu%3Dhttp%3A//www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-neil30-2009oct30%2C0%2C3315693.column%3B%7Eaopt%3D6/0/ff/1%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttp://www.tdameritrade.com/o.cgi?a=IJY&o=177&p=/offer/why.html&t=contSect-2&cid=neodinv0000000091>
<http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/trb.latimes/biz;rs=10034;rs=10070;ptype=s;slug=la-fi-neil30-2009oct30;rg=ur;ref=latimescom;pos=T;sz=728x90;tile=1;u=http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-neil30-2009oct30,0,3315693.column;ord=92462254?>
 Lexus HS250h: Keep the lights off in the garage

   - Dan Neil
   -  [image: Dan
Neil]<http://www.latimes.com/business/la-columnist-dneil,0,1620166.columnist>
   - E-mail <dan.neil at latimes.com> | Recent
columns<http://www.latimes.com/business/la-columnist-dneil,0,1620166.columnist>
   - Related
   -  Lexus HS250h:
Photos<http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-neil30-2009oct30-pg,0,6332740.photogallery>
   -  2010 Lexus HS250h:
Stats<http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-neilbox30-2009oct30,0,4690930.story>

   Find me a person who thinks this luxury hybrid is beautiful and I'll find
you someone who has a plaid La-Z-Boy in the family room.
By Dan Neil

October 30, 2009

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Text
   Size

 If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning, I'd hammer in the evening and
all over the Lexus HS250h until I beat it into something that vaguely
resembled a luxury car.

I'd start by chiseling off the Ford Fusion-like grille, then I'd go to town
pounding some rakishness into the hood and then I'd ding and dent some
character into the fuselage.

Anything. Just make the boring stop.

This is one of those instances that defy the notion that automotive styling
is subjective. Find me a person who thinks this car is beautiful and I'll
find you someone who has a plaid La-Z-Boy in the family room.

In most respects, this car makes sense to me. It makes sense for Lexus --
the luxury imprint for Toyota -- to offer a dedicated hybrid, which is to
say, a vehicle that is not a hybrid version of a conventional vehicle, and
to slot it in at the bottom of the price ladder ($34,200), between the IS
and ES models. This is Lexus' mileage marquee player, with an EPA average of
35 miles per gallon. Well done. Bully.

It also makes sense to transplant the Camry hybrid's excellent powertrain --
a 2.4-liter, 147-horsepower Atkinson-cycle engine, continuously variable
transmission, 141-hp traction motor, 244.8-volt battery, the whole kit --
into said car. We call that amortization.

It is likewise reasonable to roll in every fancy bit of electronic hardware
available in the Lexus larder. After all, sparkly electroluminescent gizmos
are a time-honored Lexus brand value. There's even an available system that
monitors the driver's face to detect whether he or she is turned away from
the road. If a frontal collision seems likely, the car will advise the
driver to turn around and continue to scream normally.

Sensibly enough, Lexus wraps that all in the propofol tranquillity Lexus is
known for. The glass is acoustically laminated; the engine sits on dynamic
engine mounts that help null out transient vibration; every corner, crease
and seam is wadded with soundproofing material like an Abbey Road studio.

I'm cool with all of that.

But it is madness -- sheer, biting-chicken-heads-off, barking lunacy -- to
stick all that hard work and expertise into the sheet metal of the
European-market Toyota Avensis, upon which the HS250h is based.

This narrow, graceless, cosmically unlovely economy car -- which is not sold
in the U.S. because it fails the ugly-car clause of various trade agreements
-- crushes any desire I might have to own an HS250h.

At this point Lexus designers will be foaming at the mouth. They'll argue
that the Avensis and the HS250h don't share any sheet metal. Please, their
mothers couldn't tell these cars apart. They'll also note they spent a
zillion hours in the wind tunnel to optimize the HS' shape for aero
efficiency as well as to tune out wind noise.

I can't hear you. The ugly is just so loud.

Here's why looks are important: Almost all cars are good, and many cars are
great. The most middling entry-level sedan today has more performance,
comfort and convenience than the most majestic luxury steamship of 20 years
ago, and much more content than most drivers ever use. Honestly, how many
times do you readjust the pedal height or set the dual-zone climate control
to different temperatures?

The point is, the reward of owning a luxury car isn't found in the bleeping
displays and ventilated seats. It's in the moment when the garage door goes
up, and you experience the deep, neuronal pleasure of confronting something
beautiful. That's luxury. That's why you write the big check.

Meanwhile, the aesthetically hamstrung HS250h is up against some serious
competition, much of it built by Toyota itself.

On the one hand, there is the Toyota Prius, which can be decked out with
many of the same tech amenities as the Lexus, and for less money too; gets
about 50% better gas mileage; and is an established icon of the Whole Foods,
MoveOn.org mind-set.

Then there's the Camry hybrid, which isn't as fancy but is a heck of a lot
bigger and more practical than the HS250h. So Lexus has cocked a howitzer,
taken aim at its foot and fired. Too bad. The HS250h is actually a pretty
interesting car and downright compelling on the inside.

The dramatically sloped central console extends on a kind of free-standing
pier between the front seats. Our fully loaded test car was equipped with
the terrific Lexus Remote Touch controller (first seen in the RX450h), a
kind of leather-lined computer mouse with haptic feedback that tugs and
kicks back as the cursor scrolls along the screen. The seats are big and
comfortable. The material quality is excellent. Lexus says about 30% of the
interior plastics are derived from plant-based materials. According to
Lexus, 85% of the HS250h is recyclable.

The sooner the better, I say.


From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Fri Oct 30 15:50:32 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:50:32 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] Large changes in fiscal policy:  taxes versus spending
In-Reply-To: <2C344777-201B-4466-B3D0-4D4DDB939633@place.org>
Message-ID: <82258.83046.qm@web33004.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Fri, 10/30/09, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
> 
> Now, I will make a value judgment:? frankly I don't
> care if we alt.pave.the.earth, so long as in doing so we get
> some form of human-derived intelligence wave-front spreading
> outward first.
> 

My fear is that we have the pedal hard against the firewall and will smash right into that brick wall of planetary carrying capacity well before we hit escape velocity.

Contributing factors to that fear: 

  Right Here on That Unremarkably Unhappy Blue Green Planet: Exponential population growth in the countries that are, simultaneously, trying their damndest to achieve our rate of consumption in about one more generation, maybe two. Even if I bought that stuff about technology increasing carrying capacity I don't see a corresponding R&D outlay in those countries. They have a stated intent to use the technologies we've developed to consume the way we do. Back To The Future.

  Hard Space Vehicle Progress: Sure, I know NASA is going to have another go at the moon but all NASA funding is really half-hearted and going downhill. And nobody else is trying at all, hardly.

  Wetware Space Vehicle Progress: I know of no psychics who have been able to get R&D funding in spite of the popularity of Ghost Whisperer and Medium. There might be $$$ going into military R&D in this field but it's probably focused on just one more way to keep an eye on us.

>
> $0.02, YMMV.
>

But of course.

        ...ken...


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From jbone at place.org  Fri Oct 30 18:36:13 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:36:13 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] Large changes in fiscal policy:  taxes versus spending
In-Reply-To: <2C344777-201B-4466-B3D0-4D4DDB939633@place.org>
References: <AAC91AFD-A19E-47BB-8ED3-BC99BF240B17@place.org>
	<2C344777-201B-4466-B3D0-4D4DDB939633@place.org>
Message-ID: <27424BBE-D75D-42D5-A4F2-4A108CF5CE76@place.org>


Ken says our options are:

   #1.  Right Here on That Unremarkably Unhappy Blue Green Planet
   #2.  Hard Space Vehicle Progress
   #3.  Wetware Space Vehicle Progress

Option #1 is the default and probably the most likely.  It's what  
happens w/o some "miracle happens here."  But there's no reason to  
think its negative implications can be avoided without a "miracle  
happens here" either, so unless you're willing to fold and go home  
right away, that leaves the other two.

Option #2 --- alternatively the "Star Trek" or "Monkeys in Tin Cans"  
option --- has extremely unfavorable energy economics plus too many  
unlikely future-history path dependencies, so I'm not betting on that  
one.

Option #3 Part A (wetware) has nothing to do with "psychics" or any  
other such nonsense.  I really have no idea what you're talking  
about;  propulsion is propulsion, nobody's assuming that wetware has  
anything to do with propulsion.

Several comments, here:  first, there *is* quite a bit of funding and  
effort going directly and indirectly into human brain emulation (cf.  
any of the supercomputing / connectome projects) --- thus despite the  
derision, it is actually the most promising alternative actually being  
pursued.  Second, the mass / energy density of such intelligence is  
likely to get very high, so the energy economics of moving such things  
around the universe is vastly better than the monkey-in-tin-can  
scenario.  Finally, it doesn't take break-through propulsion  
technology to move relatively small things without bulky meat-life  
support systems and resources around at speeds sufficient to get the  
propagation wave going*, even though such breakthroughs *could*  
potentially occur (and quicker) with better-than-human intelligence  
recursively improving itself while working the problem.  *IF* uploads  
(i.e., human brain emulation in silico) are possible, then better-than- 
human AI is most likely also possible, which improves and accelerates  
the outcomes along these lines.  (Similar comments apply to the sister  
technology that might enable this to be a more practical or at least  
more attractive solution:  molecular nanotechnology provides a means  
for virtualized human intelligence to still have significant "agency"  
within the physical world, and SAI could improve the odds of getting  
that soon enough, too.)  This is a vastly more likely scenario from a  
pure energy economics or dependencies perspective than e.g. #2.

So I'm betting on #3.  It may be far less likely than the existential  
risk outcomes implied by #1, but it's the best (really, only  
acceptable) outcome --- so that's the bet I choose to make.  It's like  
betting on cryonics:  even if there's only a 1/1x10^9 chance of it  
working, that is qualitatively infinitely better than 0, which  
likelihood all the other positive alternatives approximate.

jb

* also:  you've generally only got to move a lot of matter around  
*along the propagation wavefront.*  Once you've been some place and  
have appropriate communications gear in place behind the outward- 
moving frontier, moving virtualized people or groups around to and  
between places you've already seeded becomes a *communications*  
problem rather than a propulsion problem.  So really, to get  
colonization kick-started has *very low* energy requirements *if* you  
have virtualization.  That is, of course, modulo any large-scale  
engineering that you might want to do.  But let's leave that to the  
post-humans...

From jbone at place.org  Fri Oct 30 18:47:05 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:47:05 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] No longer about ;
	-) Re: Large changes in fiscal policy:  taxes versus spending
In-Reply-To: <27424BBE-D75D-42D5-A4F2-4A108CF5CE76@place.org>
References: <AAC91AFD-A19E-47BB-8ED3-BC99BF240B17@place.org>
	<2C344777-201B-4466-B3D0-4D4DDB939633@place.org>
	<27424BBE-D75D-42D5-A4F2-4A108CF5CE76@place.org>
Message-ID: <6A46CF64-2B65-464F-8E63-3B8DFAA69A2D@place.org>


On Oct 30, 2009, at 8:36 PM, Jeff Bone wrote:

> Finally, it doesn't take break-through propulsion technology to move  
> relatively small things without bulky meat-life support systems and  
> resources around at speeds sufficient to get the propagation wave  
> going*, even though such breakthroughs *could* potentially occur  
> (and quicker) with better-than-human intelligence recursively  
> improving itself while working the problem.

One other bit re:  rates-of-change and attendant "laws," limit  
processes, propulsion technology, and space travel...

There was some paper or other write-up a few years back that  
demonstrated that, given various assumptions about the course of  
possible future improvements in propulsion technology, there was a  
limit of distance-to-travel (or rather time to get there given your  
present propulsion technology) beyond which it made more sense to wait  
for better tech than to get underway now, as you were likely to be  
overtaken en route by waves of folks that left successively earlier.   
IIRC the limit (given a lot of iffy assumptions) was --- don't leave  
on journeys likely to take > 50 years with your present tech.  (I.e.,  
it sort of killed the generation ship idea, which always seemed stupid  
to me anyway.)

Anyone have any recollection of (or, better, a pointer to) the source  
material I'm referring to?

jb





From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Fri Oct 30 22:34:01 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:34:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [FoRK] No longer about ;
	-) Re: Large changes in fiscal policy:  taxes versus spending
In-Reply-To: <6A46CF64-2B65-464F-8E63-3B8DFAA69A2D@place.org>
Message-ID: <651558.21783.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Fri, 10/30/09, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:

> 
>? (I.e., it sort of killed the generation ship idea, which always seemed
> stupid to me anyway.)
> 

Understandable. We're already on a generation ship. If we can't figure how the hell to make this big sucker work we sure won't get it figured for anything smaller. And if we do get it figured well enough that we could scale it down then the pressure is off for leaving.

Not to say we wouldn't do it anyway, but for better reasons than that we can't live here anymore. And much better to be in control of the conditions under which we finally do it, yes?

Re: your bet on option 3 ... I'm not sure it's not a scarier bet than #1 (figuring out how to get this generation ship under control). It's not really a question of whether it has a 1/1x10^9 better chance of working, at all, than option 1. It's whether it has a better chance of working *before* we irrevocably screw up option 1. That's the time limit on any option. 

Actually the time limit on any option for leaving is probably well in advance of the final crash of generation ship Earth.

Re: "Wetware" comment in option 3 ... First, it was intended to be funny, ha-ha. Second, it *is* based on wetware. That's where it starts ... the smart part of the meat is trying to create technology to virtualize the smart part of the meat. Convert the wetware to software.

To some of us less educated schmucks it's about about the same as psychic phenomena or voo-doo.

I'm not really conversant with the technology and not planning to get there any time soon ... insufficient education to grasp more than the most basic of the basics. But from casual grazing it appears that we aren't even close to emulating anything as advanced as a fruit fly yet, are we? At the rate of publicly evident progress it could be decades before we can create something with the mental capabilities of, say, a chihuahua.

But the technology to emulate/virtualize intelligence isn't the holdback, if I understand things correctly. It's the simple fact that we really don't know much about how the smart part of the meat works. It's got to be damn hard to emulate something about which you barely understand the basics. Or still don't even understand many of the basics. I think.

      ...ken...


      __________________________________________________________________
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From jbone at place.org  Sat Oct 31 05:54:21 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:54:21 -0500
Subject: [FoRK] No longer about ;
	-) Re: Large changes in fiscal policy:  taxes versus spending
In-Reply-To: <6A46CF64-2B65-464F-8E63-3B8DFAA69A2D@place.org>
References: <AAC91AFD-A19E-47BB-8ED3-BC99BF240B17@place.org>
	<2C344777-201B-4466-B3D0-4D4DDB939633@place.org>
	<27424BBE-D75D-42D5-A4F2-4A108CF5CE76@place.org>
	<6A46CF64-2B65-464F-8E63-3B8DFAA69A2D@place.org>
Message-ID: <74834076-C968-4073-8E02-AC813A8D9AA0@place.org>


Ken says:

> I'm not sure it's not a scarier bet than #1

In some ways, #3 *is definitely* a scarier bet.  But depending on your  
handicapping the odds of making any sort of positive outcome happen  
otherwise --- as mentioned, I think that's close enough to zero to be  
zero --- it can be perceived as the only viable option.

> It's whether [#3] has a better chance of working *before* we  
> irrevocably screw up option [#1].

Absolutely!  However, and this is where it gets interesting:  per the  
earlier discussion, you realize that there's an irreconcilable  
difference between growth and sustainability within a fixed system.   
There're *some* hard limits, imposed by physics alone, in the end;   
but there are other limits that are social / technological / etc. that  
you hit long before then.  So here's the Hobson's Choice:  stop  
growing and advancing, or die.  I submit that human beings just aren't  
ever going to --- in fact, *cannot* nor *should* --- "relinquish"  
anything and just maintain a status quo.  There's no precedent for it,  
and it's arguably antithetical (and maybe anti-ethical) with respect  
to self-consciousness in the first place!  So that plus the limits  
argument shows how unlikely making #1 workable w/o running into  
unsolvable existential crises actually is.

Which is sort of my point.  The way I see it, the risks attendant to  
folks pining over #1 are *most likely* to screw up #3 before we ever  
get there --- or at least to slow the progress --- and that's an  
*astronomical* waste, cf. Bostrom.  Better to face reality  
(sustainability and improvement of quality of live, population growth,  
etc. are irreconcilable in a closed system,) stop wringing our hands  
over whether the green spotted newt's only natural habitat is sitting  
on top of that uranium mine, and go full-on toward getting out of this  
"closed system" (or rather, making the "closed system" maximally large  
in time and space.)  The folks who insist on #1, and discounting #3,  
are *compounding the existential risk to the future of intelligence  
throughout the universe.*  I can't think of anything worse, and yet  
it's driven (of course) by myopia and good intentions.

You may enjoy reading Hugo de Garis' _The Artilect War_.  It's a bit  
over-the-top and the style's a bit tough to swallow at times, but his  
basic thesis is, I think, sound.  And I have *no internal conflicts or  
ambiguity* about where I come down in his taxonomy of positions on the  
matters at hand.


> Re: "Wetware" comment in option 3 ... First, it was intended to be  
> funny


Sorry, missed that.

> It's the simple fact that we really don't know much about how the  
> smart part of the meat works.  It's got to be damn hard to emulate  
> something about which you barely understand the basics.

This is a bit of a misleading (but not uncommon, even among folks that  
spend *all* their time on such things) counter-argument, one that's  
often used when some brings up AI etc.  If you believe that mind is an  
emergent purely-physical phenomenon, then you *don't have to* (deeply)  
understand "how" the "smart part of the meat works" to simulate /  
emulate one:  you just need a high-enough fidelity simulation of the  
important physical parts and processes.  This is what the various  
supercomputing brain projects are doing.  You don't need some nebulous  
"theory of mind" (though one might allow some shortcuts, if available)  
--- you merely need a reasonably good understanding of the structure,  
electrochemistry, etc.  And we're getting that;  we're making huge and  
accelerating advances along that front every day.  In this decade  
alone we've learned more about the workings of the human brain at that  
level of detail than the sum total of our understanding of the brain  
prior to 2000.  That's how accelerating change works;  and indeed, in  
the earlier part of a change curve, things appear deceptively flat...

> At the rate of publicly evident progress it could be decades before  
> we can create something with the mental capabilities of, say, a  
> chihuahua.

I'll happily take that bet.

By any chance, recall the Human Genome Project?  Finished early (three  
reasons:  accelerating / improving technology, a "better" process  
arrived at en route, and commercial competition) yet *most* of the  
work was actually accomplished in the last bit of interval it  
spanned.  Same thing applies with any sort of compounding  
technological process.

My bet is that we'll hit human equivalence at the scale of a single  
well-funded research project *no later than* 2040, assuming we don't  
run into some other (sociopolitical, external, economic, global war,  
etc.) existential risk problem beforehand.  And actually, given the  
same assumptions, I think the *most likely* time this goal will be  
reached is 2020 +/- 5 years.


jb




From michael at i-magery.com  Sat Oct 31 09:04:53 2009
From: michael at i-magery.com (Michael Cummins)
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:04:53 -0400
Subject: [FoRK] Carrying Capacity Tangent
In-Reply-To: <74834076-C968-4073-8E02-AC813A8D9AA0@place.org>
References: <AAC91AFD-A19E-47BB-8ED3-BC99BF240B17@place.org>	<2C344777-201B-4466-B3D0-4D4DDB939633@place.org>	<27424BBE-D75D-42D5-A4F2-4A108CF5CE76@place.org>	<6A46CF64-2B65-464F-8E63-3B8DFAA69A2D@place.org>
	<74834076-C968-4073-8E02-AC813A8D9AA0@place.org>
Message-ID: <005e01ca5a43$e1edb0c0$a5c91240$@com>

I saw this Economist.com link on InstaPundit today, it was tangentially
related to the current discussion on carrying capacity, so I thought I'd
throw it in here:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14744915&fsrc=rss

"As industrialisation swept through what is now the developed world,
fertility fell sharply, first in France, then in Britain, then throughout
Europe and America. When people got richer, families got smaller; and as
families got smaller, people got richer.

Now, something similar is happening in developing countries. Fertility is
falling and families are shrinking in places- such as Brazil, Indonesia, and
even parts of India-that people think of as teeming with children. As our
briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less-the
magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually
called "the replacement rate of fertility". Sometime between 2020 and 2050
the world's fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate."






From sdw at lig.net  Sat Oct 31 21:25:18 2009
From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams)
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:25:18 -0700
Subject: [FoRK] Smart People Believe Weird Things
Message-ID: <4AED0DAE.80007@lig.net>

Nice juxtaposition in my reading today.  We've made the point of the 
first article before.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smart-people-believe-weir

> Smart People Believe Weird Things ( Preview )
> Rarely does anyone weigh facts before deciding what to believe
>
> By Michael Shermer  
>
> In April 1999, when I was on a lecture tour for my book Why People 
> Believe Weird Things, the psychologist Robert Sternberg attended my 
> presentation at Yale University. His response to the lecture was both 
> enlightening and troubling. It is certainly entertaining to hear about 
> other people's weird beliefs, Sternberg reflected, because we are 
> confident that we would never be so foolish. But why do smart people 
> fall for such things? Sternberg's challenge led to a second edition of 
> my book, with a new chapter expounding on my answer to his question: 
> Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at 
> defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.
>
> Rarely do any of us sit down before a table of facts, weigh them pro 
> and con, and choose the most logical and rational explanation, 
> regardless of what we previously believed. Most of us, most of the 
> time, come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do 
> with empirical evidence and logical reasoning. Rather, such variables 
> as genetic predisposition, parental predilection, sibling influence, 
> peer pressure, educational experience and life impressions all shape 
> the personality preferences that, in conjunction with numerous social 
> and cultural influences, lead us to our beliefs. We then sort through 
> the body of data and select those that most confirm what we already 
> believe, and ignore or rationalize away those that do not.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/08/AR2009100803911_pf.html
> Steven F. Hayward wrote: "The single largest defect of modern 
> conservatism, in my mind, is its insufficient ability to challenge 
> liberalism at the intellectual level. . . ."
>
> No.
>
> The single largest defect of modern conservatism is that it has ruined 
> the nation.
>
> Conservatives do not have ideas; they have interests.
>
> Conservatives are not "thinkers"; they are rationalizers who give an 
> intellectual gloss to their belief that an alliance of predatory 
> businesspeople and religious extremists should rule the rest of us.
>
> The wreckage caused by modern conservatism lies all around us, and 
> speaks for itself: If conservatism isn't dead, it should be.
>
> DANIEL ROSEN
>
> Baltimore 


sdw


From jbone at place.org  Sun Nov  1 10:28:06 2009
From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 12:28:06 -0600
Subject: [FoRK] Kling vs. Hanson, Kurzweil, and GAI (sort of)
Message-ID: <14B5FBFB-3964-477A-8C92-08EA385F119D@place.org>


Interesting stuff, some meat, thought-provoking.

Kling v. Hanson and arguments-from-authority from this past Friday:

   http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/robin_hanson_ar.html

Kling's "Where I'd Bet Against Kurzweil" from 2005 (with relevant and  
insightful analysis)

   http://techcentralstation.com/article.aspx?id=081705C

Kling's "On Intelligence, People, and Computers" from 2004

   http://www.techcentralstation.com/article.aspx?id=112204B


$0.02,

jb


From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Sun Nov  1 12:13:51 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 12:13:51 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [FoRK] Kling vs. Hanson, Kurzweil, and GAI (sort of)
In-Reply-To: <14B5FBFB-3964-477A-8C92-08EA385F119D@place.org>
Message-ID: <177074.55039.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

[Yeah, I know all about the horrors of top-posting but I leave Jeff's note attached for reference, not because I'm responding to any specific statement in it.]

Thanks for posting that, Jeff. It's interesting ... when I read Kling's Friday article yesterday I was planning to use exactly those essays to support my contention that we are likely even farther from virtualizing anything remotely resembling human intelligence than my own most pessimistic guess to this point.

If we want to send out a "wavefront of human intelligence" it has to be human intelligence. The very best I can see in any forseeable future (a century or two, not decades) would be the agents that Kling talked about. That's barely machine intelligence. It's not even close to human intelligence.

After reading Kling I think I'll keep my focus on ways to get this generation ship under control, either proactively or by teaching my progeny how to survive what comes next so they can be part of the next attempt.

        ...ken...

--- On Sun, 11/1/09, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:

> From: Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org>
> Subject: [FoRK] Kling vs. Hanson, Kurzweil, and GAI (sort of)
> To: "Friends of Rohit Khare" <fork at xent.com>
> Received: Sunday, November 1, 2009, 12:28 PM
> 
> Interesting stuff, some meat, thought-provoking.
> 
> Kling v. Hanson and arguments-from-authority from this past
> Friday:
> 
> ? http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/robin_hanson_ar.html
> 
> Kling's "Where I'd Bet Against Kurzweil" from 2005 (with
> relevant and insightful analysis)
> 
> ? http://techcentralstation.com/article.aspx?id=081705C
> 
> Kling's "On Intelligence, People, and Computers" from 2004
> 
> ? http://www.techcentralstation.com/article.aspx?id=112204B
> 
> 
> $0.02,
> 
> jb
> 
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
> 


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From sdw at lig.net  Sun Nov  1 15:43:12 2009
From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams)
Date: Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:43:12 -0800
Subject: [FoRK] Kling vs. Hanson, Kurzweil, and GAI (sort of)
In-Reply-To: <177074.55039.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <177074.55039.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4AEE1D10.10108@lig.net>

Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo wrote:
> [Yeah, I know all about the horrors of top-posting but I leave Jeff's note attached for reference, not because I'm responding to any specific statement in it.]
>
> Thanks for posting that, Jeff. It's interesting ... when I read Kling's Friday article yesterday I was planning to use exactly those essays to support my contention that we are likely even farther from virtualizing anything remotely resembling human intelligence than my own most pessimistic guess to this point.
>
> If we want to send out a "wavefront of human intelligence" it has to be human intelligence. The very best I can see in any forseeable future (a century or two, not decades) would be the agents that Kling talked about. That's barely machine intelligence. It's not even close to human intelligence.
>   

I'm very optimistic, but not certain.  Expecting linear or even log 
progress is not realistic in this area.  Success will likely be 
discontinuous, surprising, and both fast and slow in unexpected ways.  
If everyone is convinced it can't happen, then it won't.  As long as 
enough smart people are optimistic and curious, it will make progress.  
We're pretty much out of the AI dark ages now.  With some success 
already behind us, hopefully it won't die back again.  Clearly, you 
don't want to start selling investors on AGIs.  For business, you just 
sell the nifty algorithms you happen upon.  That doesn't mean you 
shouldn't keep trying to contribute to the AGI dream.

And besides, it's fun!

This was a cool link from the first link below:
http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets.html

Stephen
> After reading Kling I think I'll keep my focus on ways to get this generation ship under control, either proactively or by teaching my progeny how to survive what comes next so they can be part of the next attempt.
>
>         ...ken...
>
> --- On Sun, 11/1/09, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> From: Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org>
>> Subject: [FoRK] Kling vs. Hanson, Kurzweil, and GAI (sort of)
>> To: "Friends of Rohit Khare" <fork at xent.com>
>> Received: Sunday, November 1, 2009, 12:28 PM
>>
>> Interesting stuff, some meat, thought-provoking.
>>
>> Kling v. Hanson and arguments-from-authority from this past
>> Friday:
>>
>>   http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/robin_hanson_ar.html
>>
>> Kling's "Where I'd Bet Against Kurzweil" from 2005 (with
>> relevant and insightful analysis)
>>
>>   http://techcentralstation.com/article.aspx?id=081705C
>>
>> Kling's "On Intelligence, People, and Computers" from 2004
>>
>>   http://www.techcentralstation.com/article.aspx?id=112204B
>>
>>
>> $0.02,
>>
>> jb
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> FoRK mailing list
>> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>>
>>     
>
>
>       __________________________________________________________________
> Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr! 
>
> http://www.flickr.com/gift/
>
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>   


From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca  Sun Nov  1 16:26:27 2009
From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 16:26:27 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [FoRK] Kling vs. Hanson, Kurzweil, and GAI (sort of)
In-Reply-To: <4AEE1D10.10108@lig.net>
Message-ID: <247341.96144.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Sun, 11/1/09, Stephen Williams <sdw at lig.net> wrote:
>
> ... If everyone is convinced it can't happen, then it won't.? As long
>  as enough smart people are optimistic and curious, it will make
>  progress.? ...  That doesn't mean you shouldn't keep trying to 
>  contribute to the AGI dream.
> 

Here's the problem I have. I think we should do it all. But too many of the Powers That Be -- those who have the power but probably not the knowledge or interest -- have binary minds. It's either This or That, not both. That's not to say they all see only in black and white. But sufficient of our politicians and other power brokers do to make it problematic.

I think we still need to work seriously on managing the generation ship better. But that does not, nor should it, preclude working on other neat stuff. Especially if it's fun.

If we're going to crash, we should at least enjoy the ride even as we try to find the brakes or how to deploy the wings.  :-)

        ...ken...


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