[FRIAM] deficits do not matter

[Pieter Steenekamp]

I'm not American but I'm a huge fan. It's where South Africans like Elon go
because they are given space to innovate.

It's just that I'm a bit concerned that the US government has possibly
lately been slightly irresponsible in managing their finances? The graphs
in the article in the link below paint a not-so-pretty-picture of what's
happening.

https://reason.com/2021/05/05/looming-budget-catastrophe-in-pictures-so-simple-even-congress-can-understand/
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Re: [FRIAM] In the coldness of space...

[Pieter Steenekamp]

I'm a little bit unsure about my knowledge about the subject, please feel
free to correct me if I'm wrong. Below is how I interpret some key issues
around quantum computers.

There are two different issues around quantum computers:

1 Practicalities around building a quantum computer with enough qbits to
solve real world problems efficiently. There are many teams working on this
and it's not very clear when (if?) this will be realized.

2 The type of problems that can or cannot be solved using quantum computers

a) There are a small set of problems that can be solved efficiently using
known quantum computer algorithms. For example, Shor's algorithm is a
quantum computer algorithm for integer factorization.RSA encryption is
commonly used in the financial industry (including Bitcoin) and if you can
do integer factorization efficiently you can break RSA encryption.
(Note that there are other types of encryption algorithms that cannot be
solved using any current quantum computer algorithm and the financial world
has plans to adapt their encryption technology appropriately.)
An interesting issue around this is that there are undoubtedly many RSA
encrypted messages out there that have been intercepted by bad actors and
saved to be decoded using future quantum computers. It's going to be very
interesting indeed.

b) a Big question is whether a quantum computer algorithm will be found to
solve problems like the travelling salesman problem efficiently. To keep
this post simple I'm not going into computational complexity theory, I'll
just give the conclusion:
If a quantum computer algorithm is developed to solve a problem like the
travelling salesman problem efficiently then it will also be able to solve
many other real world problems (NP-complete problems) efficiently and that
will have a huge positive impact on the world. (This is of course also
provided point 1 above is met)

On Thu, 6 May 2021 at 03:27, Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> Classical or quantum computers need to be protected against radiation and
> designed to tolerate more of it.  Space is an even harsher environment, not
> having the magnetosphere to protect against ionizing radiation.  One of the
> main difficulties in quantum computing is achieving control but without
> giving up isolation.   One wants qubits that are coupled to the things in
> the quantum computer but not everything else in the universe.   A related
> tradeoff is how much time it takes to control a qubit.   If it is well
> isolated, like in an ion trap, it tends to take a long time.  If it is less
> well isolated, like a superconducting quantum interference device, it may
> be easier to configure.
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of jon zingale
> Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 8:29 AM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: [FRIAM] In the coldness of space...
>
> In the coldest reaches of space, with what probability can I expect there
> to be quantum Turing machines? A number of years ago, I ran across a
> lecture by John Conway where he discusses the ubiquity of computers, his
> thought experiment posits a large warehouse, full of transistors and other
> electronic components, and a madman with a soldering iron. He then goes on
> to say that for a sufficiently large warehouse, with probability one, we
> should expect to find the universal machine.
>
> I know that some on this list actually know about quantum computers, so
> please let me know if this idea is terribly flawed somehow. To the extent
> that such computers are out there, what would their architecture likely be?
> In the meantime, I will continue to fantasize about the scaffoldings that
> such computers may provide to the orderliness of what I can see.
> Perhaps, this is covered by the Hooft paper on vacuum fluctuations?
> I still need to read the paper.
>
> Tags:
> - Conway's madman:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQUAwhhC8cU=2363s_channel=IstrailLaboratory
>
> - Formation of hydrocarbon chains in interstellar space:
>
> https://phys.org/news/2017-02-constraining-chemistry-carbon-chain-molecules-space.html
>
>
>
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[FRIAM] Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc

[thompnickson2]

Dear Colleagues, 

 

I attach a paper 
written by an internet acquaintance I made some years back, Dragan Pavlovic.
I am sending it along for two reasons.  First, it reveals (to me, at least)
that the two negative studies on Hydroxychloroquine use in SARS-CoVid-19
treatment were based on unverified data and were withdrawn by their authors
almost immediately.  (Have the rest of you known this for the last year and
not told me?  I cannot believe, after we pilloried poor Dave for advocating
for it, that he has not gloated about it. ) Second, Pavlovic raises the
intension/extension distinction in the context of the interpretation of
scientific results and also questions Randomized Control Trials as the "Gold
Standard" for discovery. Thus, I think he is a kindred spirit, being a bit
of a grumpy contrarian like many of us here.  I have promised to forward any
comments you make to him, so be polite but speak truth.   

 

Thanks, 

 

Nick Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

thompnicks...@gmail.com  

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

 

 

 

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[David Eric Smith]

Yes, agreed, Russ, with amendments.

I wrote some long awful thing on this yesterday and had the good manners to 
delete without sending.

I think capitalism isn’t even about money; there are two issues: capitalist 
property rights and monetary or financial layers in the economy.

I know Glen doesn’t like the terms “means of production”, but we can capture a 
big subset with an everyday term like “tools”.  Tools are durable things, built 
at cost with the intent that they can be repeatedly used.  They are not a 
monetary store of value, but they are, in other material senses, a store of 
transformational power over things one wants to transform.

But as soon as there is a tool, there is a decision problem over how it can be 
used and by whom.  I think “ownership rights” is the name we give to any 
solution to (meaning, “commitment to some protocol for”) that problem.  With 
ownership then comes at least an incentive, and in many real, 
limited-information settings, a realized ability, for the de facto owner of a 
tool to guide where the productive output using the tool goes.  It’s kind of 
the default basic-layer dynamic that follows from tool creation and tool 
ownership.  We can understand how tricky that instability can be to manage from 
study of these intricate and fancy mechanisms in hunter-gatherer societies to 
blunt the concentration of power (arrow-sharing that guides who gets meat; the 
kind of thing Sam Bowles studies).  Ownership provides a channel for itself to 
concentrate, and to concentrate other things (obliquely, referring to “wealth” 
by whatever measure).  That seems to me the essence of the capitalist problem, 
which then takes various forms depending on social institutional choices.

It seems to me that we don’t want to give up tools, so we can’t give up the 
problem of committing to some solution for ownership, and with that, we have to 
face up to the complex problem of regulating against the tendency of ownership 
to concentrate its de facto power by redirecting the proceeds of things 
produced.

This is why I don’t buy, as an empirical matter, Pieter’s optimism about 
things’ becoming too cheap to meter.  In some ways, and in projections to some 
dimensions, yes, that is a fair description.  Computer operating systems used 
to be pay-per-version, now many are free.  Communication used to be 
charge-per-use, now much of it is paid for by advertising (“free” only in an 
extreme distortion of what dimensions carry value, but nonetheless one that has 
taken most people some years to become aware of).  But the very way the rise of 
the concentration of wealth in the Tech sector before, and even more 
grotesquely so during the pandemic, is raising all the old arguments about the 
capitalist class, seems to me to show even in quite abstract domains of 
information and coordination services, that tool ownership has default 
instabilities that always act unless we can find effective regulatory 
strategies to blunt them.

In this sense I think Glen does make the most important point, which is that if 
there is a strong argument about UBI, its context is overwhelmingly about the 
problem that innovations in absolute output seem always coupled to 
concentrations of inequality.  Relative to that, almost everything Shapiro said 
in that piece was tropes that, at 15 places in the short talk, gave me an 
internal impulse to go cite the person who shows they are tropes by providing 
the good-faith and well thought-out counterargument.  It is a bit sad that Yang 
doesn’t feel able (and maybe isn’t able) to take that bull by the horns and say 
that this is where the UBI question lives.  


To me, money is a somewhat separate question: a mechanism for the distribution 
of permissions, communication, authority, etc., which makes certain 
coordination problems tractable that otherwise wouldn’t be.  I don’t think we 
want to give up the ability to use that, and even if some did, so many others 
don’t that there probably is no path for society that keeps it gone.  But, as 
many in the thread have so well said already, money is a terrible 
dimension-reducer, and the problems of “store of transformation power” that 
come with tool ownership, then take on new versions as “store of value” which 
is a kind of exchangeable access to ownership rights over everything.  But 
again, if we either can’t or (I will accept the position of) don’t want to give 
up what it allows us to do, we again face the complexity and difficulty of 
inventing or evolving (in whatever combinations) regulatory strategies to try 
to limits its default instabilities.

Anyway, to say I agree with Russ’s motivation to push this point.

Eric




> On May 6, 2021, at 8:15 AM, Russ Abbott  wrote:
> 
> Earlier, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ said: If we're stuck with capitalism, then I'm for UBI. If 
> we can get out from under capitalism, then I'm not.  Nick added: it is the 
> "triumph" of capitalism to reduce all relationships to money. 
> 
> I wonder if this 

Re: [FRIAM] In the coldness of space...

[Marcus Daniels]

Classical or quantum computers need to be protected against radiation and 
designed to tolerate more of it.  Space is an even harsher environment, not 
having the magnetosphere to protect against ionizing radiation.  One of the 
main difficulties in quantum computing is achieving control but without giving 
up isolation.   One wants qubits that are coupled to the things in the quantum 
computer but not everything else in the universe.   A related tradeoff is how 
much time it takes to control a qubit.   If it is well isolated, like in an ion 
trap, it tends to take a long time.  If it is less well isolated, like a 
superconducting quantum interference device, it may be easier to configure.   

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 8:29 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] In the coldness of space...

In the coldest reaches of space, with what probability can I expect there to be 
quantum Turing machines? A number of years ago, I ran across a lecture by John 
Conway where he discusses the ubiquity of computers, his thought experiment 
posits a large warehouse, full of transistors and other electronic components, 
and a madman with a soldering iron. He then goes on to say that for a 
sufficiently large warehouse, with probability one, we should expect to find 
the universal machine.

I know that some on this list actually know about quantum computers, so please 
let me know if this idea is terribly flawed somehow. To the extent that such 
computers are out there, what would their architecture likely be? In the 
meantime, I will continue to fantasize about the scaffoldings that such 
computers may provide to the orderliness of what I can see.
Perhaps, this is covered by the Hooft paper on vacuum fluctuations?
I still need to read the paper.

Tags:
- Conway's madman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQUAwhhC8cU=2363s_channel=IstrailLaboratory

- Formation of hydrocarbon chains in interstellar space:
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-constraining-chemistry-carbon-chain-molecules-space.html



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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

Well, there are smarter people than me, who know more about Marxism than I do, 
on this list. But it seems there are ~5 principles to guide it:

• civilization is already a cooperative enterprise, it's just a matter of 
cooperation's extent/ubiquity
• there's nothing supernatural, so all solutions have to be built on science
• innovation, technology, culture, etc. are limited only by nature; so in 
principle the things we build (including governments) can be as big and complex 
as the natural world
• class is a cultural construct; we create it; hence we can eliminate it
• the spectral signature of organization sizes is present in nature and should 
be mirrored in society (e.g. power laws for org sizes, small world networks, 
etc)

None of this implies the elimination of money. Reduction to a single dimension 
is just fine *when* it works. But when it doesn't work, it has to be "fleshed 
out" with other structure. Contracts are such a structure. We use contracts all 
the time to flesh out our money-based transactions. And contracts need not be 
simply pairwise (as Pieter seemed to imply with his conception of a free 
market). Contracts can be between any number of groups or individuals ... they 
nest.

The trick is with the legal system and spatiotemporal extension. When the 
lawyers draw up a contract and the courts judge an alleged breach, there's 
spatial extent that we can't codify (unintended consequences, externalities). 
And do contracts have higher order effects (extend to descendants, siblings, 
business partners, etc.)? Designing a legal system to align with the 5 basic 
principles above would, I think, produce something very unlike capitalism ... 
but maybe not whatever it is the Marxists imagine would emerge.

I'm sure the above is too vague. But it's the best I can do. As I tried to make 
clear *I* have no idea what could replace capitalism. I don't even understand 
socialism. Smarter people than me would have to work it out.


On 5/5/21 4:15 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Earlier, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ said: If we're stuck with capitalism, then I'm for UBI. If 
> we can get out from under capitalism, then I'm not.  Nick added: it is the 
> "triumph" of capitalism to reduce all relationships to money. 
> 
> I wonder if this is not assuming that there is an alternative to what you are 
> calling /capitalism/. As uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ points out, co-ops can work on relatively 
> small scales, but if we are going to live in groups of larger than ~150 
> people, how are you imagining that we will arrange interactions without 
> something like money? Even on small scales, how will a collective without 
> money organize itself in anything other than a very static structure? And on 
> larger scales, what is the organizing principle other than power? It's not 
> clear to me how an alternative that uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ is supposing possible will 
> actually work.  uǝlƃ ↙↙↙, would you mind elaborating what you have in mind?

-- 
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[Russ Abbott]

Earlier, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ said: If we're stuck with capitalism, then I'm for UBI.
If we can get out from under capitalism, then I'm not.  Nick added: it is
the "triumph" of capitalism to reduce all relationships to money.

I wonder if this is not assuming that there is an alternative to what you
are calling *capitalism*. As uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ points out, co-ops can work on
relatively small scales, but if we are going to live in groups of larger
than ~150 people, how are you imagining that we will arrange interactions
without something like money? Even on small scales, how will a
collective without
money organize itself in anything other than a very static structure? And
on larger scales, what is the organizing principle other than power? It's
not clear to me how an alternative that uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ is supposing possible will
actually work.  uǝlƃ ↙↙↙, would you mind elaborating what you have in mind?

-- Russ Abbott

On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 2:17 PM jon zingale  wrote:

> Yeah, I think it is safe to say that "huge costs" are a sign of progress in
> the same sense that smoke is a sign of fire.
>
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[jon zingale]

Yeah, I think it is safe to say that "huge costs" are a sign of progress in
the same sense that smoke is a sign of fire.



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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[thompnickson2]

And how is environmental degradation not, after all, progress? 



Nick Thompson
thompnicks...@gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 11:34 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Is it also fair to say that human progress came at a huge cost to ourselves?



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[FRIAM] Germans head to Russia on the COVID package...

[jon zingale]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUKgJQfoZ14_channel=DWNews
While Sputnik V has yet to be approved in the EU, it is surprising how
effective
the vaccine has proven to be.

Meanwhile, Mexico develops a nasal vaccine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IS3QvLVues_channel=DWNews

and ultimately, even if it were to mean an economic hit for someone,
would it be worth it to suspect some amount of patent gains to have
drug manufacturers in 3rd world countries produce the few vaccines
that we know to safely work? Is economy a sacrifice we are willing to
make for social good?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXWhMwixtws_channel=DWNews



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[FRIAM] FW: (no subject)

[thompnickson2]

Oh, and …. this problem … 

If that intuition is valid, then the only things Selection could ever rescue 
from chaos become those that get canalized into these ur- developmental 
“programs”, with defined roles for genes, and merely allelic variation within 
each role. I would like to find a formal way to frame that assertion as a 
question and then solve it.

… is the one that keeps me awake at night. 

 

Let me put it another way: When the waiter rolls up the dessert cart, you are 
so dazzled by choice between the crème caramel, the tiramisu and the chocolate 
mousse cake, that you never stop to wonder how the cart got created.   

 

Nick 

 

 

Nick Thompson

thompnicks...@gmail.com  

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

From: thompnicks...@gmail.com   
mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> > 
Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 2:01 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' mailto:friam@redfish.com> >
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] (no subject)

 

Jon,

 

Mostly your comments were out of my league.  

 

However, one probably irrelevant fragment caught my eye.

 

While Lamarckism wasn't right for Darwin… .

 

Darwin always was a Lamarckian and became ever more so with every passing 
edition of the Origin. My favorite question in Biology orals was, “Who was the 
most famous Lamarckian?”  

 

I think you could say, with out contradiction

 

While Lamarckism isn’t right for most contemporary  Darwinians… .

 

 

… but evern that is becoming less true.  

 

I think you are talking about Weismann and Weismann’s Barrier 
 ?  Lamarckism was definitely 
not right for Weisman. 

 

Nick Thompson

thompnicks...@gmail.com  

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > On 
Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 10:45 AM
To: friam@redfish.com  
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (no subject)

 

EricS,

 

Thank you for the kind and thoughtful response. Your 'three levels'

project is interesting to me and reminds me (even if only tangentially) of an 
analysis I worked on regarding food webs, n-species Lotka-Volterra, and ABMs. I 
wanted to clarify for myself what each level of analysis offered or bracketed 
relative to one another. There:

 

1. Food webs were analyzed as weighted graphs with the obvious Markov chain 
interpretation[ρ]. Each edge effectively summarizing the complex predator-prey 
interactions found at level 2, but without the plethora of ODEs to solve.

 

2. N-species Lotka-Volterra, while being a jumble of equations, offered 
dynamics. Here, one could get insight into how the static edge values of level 
1 were in fact fluctuating values in n-dimensional phase space. But still, one 
is working with an aggregate model where species is summarized wholly by 
population count.

 

3. ABMs, in theory, ought to be the whole story of individuals located in space 
and time. There the agents (a lynx, say) 'decides' what to eat based, perhaps, 
on what is most readily available. But as everyone on the list knows, analysis 
at such a fine-grained scale is simply a mess.

 

I never did get as far with the analysis as I would have liked, and I never got 
the chance to share my findings, so yeah, thanks for the tangential 
opportunity, here and now, to say just this much.

 

1'. "site-rewrite rules in Walter Fontana’s site-graph abstractions"

 

Fleshing out some of your references, I found this Fontana paper[σ].

As you suggest, the style is fairly straightforward category theory.

Site-graphs and their morphisms form a well-defined category and a number of 
universal constructions (push-outs, pullbacks, cospans,...) are used to analyze 
the algebra and to establish its logic.

 

2'. "There is still an algebra of operation of reactions, but it is simpler 
than the algebra of rules, and mostly about counting."

 

I am not entirely sure that I follow the distinction. Am I far off in seeing an 
analogy here to the differences found between my one and two above? I would 
love to have a facility with stochastic techniques like these, but I most 
likely will need to remain a spectator for the rest of my days. Occasionally, I 
meet LANL folk that can talk Feller and Fokker with ease, and I am always 
jealous. It would be great to even have a better understanding of where Lie 
groups (something I can at least think about) meet the stochastic world.

 

3'. "So the state space is just a lattice. The “generator” from Level 2 is the 
generator of stochastic processes over this state space, and it is where 
probability distributions live."

 

Please write more on this. By 'just a lattice' do you mean integer-valued on 
account of the counts being so? Is the state space used to some extent, like a 
modulii/classifying space, for characterizing the species of 

Re: [FRIAM] (no subject)

[jon zingale]

You're right ;) That is also one of my favorite facts about Darwin.



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Re: [FRIAM] (no subject)

[thompnickson2]

Jon,

 

Mostly your comments were out of my league.  

 

However, one probably irrelevant fragment caught my eye.

 

While Lamarckism wasn't right for Darwin… .

 

Darwin always was a Lamarckian and became ever more so with every passing 
edition of the Origin. My favorite question in Biology orals was, “Who was the 
most famous Lamarckian?”  

 

I think you could say, with out contradiction

 

While Lamarckism isn’t right for most contemporary  Darwinians… .

 

 

… but evern that is becoming less true.  

 

I think you are talking about Weismann and Weismann’s Barrier 
 ?  Lamarckism was definitely 
not right for Weisman. 

 

Nick Thompson

thompnicks...@gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 10:45 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (no subject)

 

EricS,

 

Thank you for the kind and thoughtful response. Your 'three levels'

project is interesting to me and reminds me (even if only tangentially) of an 
analysis I worked on regarding food webs, n-species Lotka-Volterra, and ABMs. I 
wanted to clarify for myself what each level of analysis offered or bracketed 
relative to one another. There:

 

1. Food webs were analyzed as weighted graphs with the obvious Markov chain 
interpretation[ρ]. Each edge effectively summarizing the complex predator-prey 
interactions found at level 2, but without the plethora of ODEs to solve.

 

2. N-species Lotka-Volterra, while being a jumble of equations, offered 
dynamics. Here, one could get insight into how the static edge values of level 
1 were in fact fluctuating values in n-dimensional phase space. But still, one 
is working with an aggregate model where species is summarized wholly by 
population count.

 

3. ABMs, in theory, ought to be the whole story of individuals located in space 
and time. There the agents (a lynx, say) 'decides' what to eat based, perhaps, 
on what is most readily available. But as everyone on the list knows, analysis 
at such a fine-grained scale is simply a mess.

 

I never did get as far with the analysis as I would have liked, and I never got 
the chance to share my findings, so yeah, thanks for the tangential 
opportunity, here and now, to say just this much.

 

1'. "site-rewrite rules in Walter Fontana’s site-graph abstractions"

 

Fleshing out some of your references, I found this Fontana paper[σ].

As you suggest, the style is fairly straightforward category theory.

Site-graphs and their morphisms form a well-defined category and a number of 
universal constructions (push-outs, pullbacks, cospans,...) are used to analyze 
the algebra and to establish its logic.

 

2'. "There is still an algebra of operation of reactions, but it is simpler 
than the algebra of rules, and mostly about counting."

 

I am not entirely sure that I follow the distinction. Am I far off in seeing an 
analogy here to the differences found between my one and two above? I would 
love to have a facility with stochastic techniques like these, but I most 
likely will need to remain a spectator for the rest of my days. Occasionally, I 
meet LANL folk that can talk Feller and Fokker with ease, and I am always 
jealous. It would be great to even have a better understanding of where Lie 
groups (something I can at least think about) meet the stochastic world.

 

3'. "So the state space is just a lattice. The “generator” from Level 2 is the 
generator of stochastic processes over this state space, and it is where 
probability distributions live."

 

Please write more on this. By 'just a lattice' do you mean integer-valued on 
account of the counts being so? Is the state space used to some extent, like a 
modulii/classifying space, for characterizing the species of reactions? I feel 
the fuzziest on how this level and the 2nd relate.

 

I am thankful to have had drinks with Artemy on a number of occasions, though I 
am embarrassed to have never asked him to blow my mind, as he could so easily 
have done.

 

I am working, slowly, through Valiant's discussion of evolvability problems 
regarding monotone disjunction and parity. I will hopefully have more to say 
soon. One thing that stands out for me is the idea that Lamarck could be so 
right, but about the wrong thing, a concept in search of a problem. While 
Lamarckism wasn't right for Darwin, it was fine for perceptrons.

 

"""

If that intuition is valid, then the only things Selection could ever rescue 
from chaos become those that get canalized into these ur- developmental 
“programs”, with defined roles for genes, and merely allelic variation within 
each role. I would like to find a formal way to frame that assertion as a 
question and then solve it.

"""

 

Yes, that would be very exciting.

 

Cheers,

Jon

 

ps. I wrote Nick and Frank about a dream a day or two before your post, where I 
found myself sitting with a 

Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[jon zingale]

I look forward to my next trip to Britain. It will be nice to sit back,
relax, and let my sinister hand drive.



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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[Steve Smith]

> Agreed! One can have meaningless sex, but who wants to?
Is that anything like gratuitous amounts of torque in your BMW?

My Volt has silly amounts of torque, especially off the line and it is
modulated to not allow tire slippage, but in spite of having a slightly
difficult highway-entry I rarely go past 2/3 on the accelerator.   In
another phase of life, I'd probably waste the extra electrons *every*
time I pulled away, but now it is nice just to know that trade-space is
available if I want it.


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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[jon zingale]

Agreed! One can have meaningless sex, but who wants to?



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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[thompnickson2]

Agreed! But so can discussions of bmw torque.  It’s just what you care to 
invest in.  

 

N

 

Nick Thompson

  thompnicks...@gmail.com

  
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 7:31 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

 

Ahhh Nick,

 

Such limited vision. You may be correct vis-a-vis money (as nothing more than a 
pathological distortion — I have no experience) but are so wrong, at least 
potentially about sex. Like drugs, it can be a gateway to realms of knowledge, 
inter-personal and social connectivity, human and trans-human experience. 

 

davew

 

 

On Tue, May 4, 2021, at 9:42 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com 
  wrote:

Dave,

 

No you can’t have read it.  Otherwise your life would have been completely 
transformed because you would have come to belief that sex- and mone- seeking 
are pathological distortions of human ambition. 

 

I pretty sure nobody has read it because, so far as I know, nobody has been 
thus affected.  Ergo, …

 

Nick

Nick Thompson

  thompnicks...@gmail.com

  
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > On 
Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Tuesday, May 4, 2021 8:45 PM

To: friam@redfish.com  

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

 

Diamond Age: Or, A Young Woman's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson

 

Required reading for any discussion of economics when the robots produce 
abundance, or things are too cheap to meter.

 

Nick won'ty read, pretty sure Steve and other already have.

 

davew

 

 

On Tue, May 4, 2021, at 3:31 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

> I'm glad I held back from throwing in my own $.002 on this topic

> earlier... I like the general arc it is on and is being articulated much

> more gesturally than I think I am capable of.   I can't say I *fully*

> follow Glen's use of reduction and reconstruction in technical detail

> well, but it suggests an abstraction that rings hopeful if not

> (necessarily) true for me.

> 

> Given that my trite belief that "when the road hazards are coming at us

> faster than we can see much less avoid, that we should pump the brakes

> and downshift" is based in an inapt (inept?) metaphor, and that in any

> case we aren't going to do a whole lot of self-limiting under the

> current aesthetic we (mostly) share (pedal to the metal and let 'er

> roar!).  

> 

> The Prepper/Survivalist community is mostly about trying to gather up

> the resources they think will help them survive a crash or more

> importantly the aftermath.   The post/transhumanists seem to be trying

> to figure out how to strapon (or grow out of their own bodies') wings

> and jet packs and road armor to escape or survive the inevitable crash.

> 

> Careening vehicle metaphors aside, I'm pleased to hear more and more

> discussion that frames the economic aspect of "the culture war" as

> *post* rather than *anti* capitalism.  Whether technology makes

> *everything* too cheap to meter or not, I think the relative abundance

> of manufactured goods as well as commodities for the top 50% of the

> first world is confronting the *scarcity* model that was (maybe?)

> necessary to keep the engine (oops, vehicles made it back in) of

> consumerist markets accelerating.  

> 

> I am not sure that Yang has all (or even many) of the answers but I do

> give him great credit for having promoted the question on the national

> (and world?) stage with his run for President.   I had thought about UBI

> and similar mechanisms before but somehow his presentation or affect or

> maybe just timing brought it to me in a much more compelling way than

> before.

> 

> I very much appreciate Glen's point about UBI being an intrinsically

> capitalist proposal to try to keep their system going as long as

> possible, I just hope we will use whatever time that buys us without

> significant disruption to plan out what things might/could look like on

> the other side of a revolution in (socioeconomic?) thinking that now

> seem inevitable to me.When I used to ski (poorly), on any given run,

> there was likely a brief period of time when I realized I as absolutely

> going to crash and burn, and if I had any choice in the matter it was

> whether I was going to do it earlier rather than later and whether I was

> going to take a big bite of ice-slicked mogul, some off-run powder, or

> maybe a tree.Maybe I'll just leap off a mogul and evaporate in the

> sunlight mid-air (Kurzweil's Singularity)?

> 

> - Steve

> 

> On 5/4/21 12:52 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

> > Reduction. All things in moderation, including moderation. Reduction is a 
> > triumph, if it captures 

Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[jon zingale]

Is it also fair to say that human progress came at a huge cost to ourselves?



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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[Pieter Steenekamp]

Nick,

I was bracing myself for you to say "*Yes, it's progress, but at what cost
to the environment?*"

I'm not defending the undefendable, human progress came at a huge cost to
the environment.

On Wed, 5 May 2021 at 17:28,  wrote:

> Hi, Pieter,
>
>
>
> I am tempted to say:
>
>
>
> *“Yes.  But what have you done for me, LATELY?” *[Joke}
>
>
>
> And
>
>
>
> *I have always been suspicious of Pinker;  too much HAIR.**  [worse joke]*
>
>
>
> *And *
>
>
>
> *“But where’s the PROGRESS?”**  [Even worse joke]*
>
>
>
> *And*
>
>
>
> *But is it sustainable?**  [perhaps not a joke?]*
>
>
>
> But I am stalling.  Your argument is of the form, “Thompson, bugger your
> Jesuitical term splitting.  These things are PROGRESS and you damn well
> know it.”
>
>
>
> I find that argument compelling.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nick Thompson
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Pieter Steenekamp
> *Sent:* Tuesday, May 4, 2021 10:11 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI
>
>
>
>   I'd like to address a point Nick made earlier:
>
>
>
> *Well, the first step would be to make a distinction between "progress"
> and "change", with the former being a subset of the latter.  Now, the task
> is to see if there is any way to define "progress" transculturally.  For
> me, culture bound as I am, hand and foot, the wordprocessor program was
> progress because it made it easier to do the things I love to do, and
> facebook was regress because it demanded I do things I did not want to do.*
>
>
>
> I'm quoting from https://rootsofprogress.org/enlightenment-now,
> discussing Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now:
>
>
> " the bulk of the book is devoted to an empirical analysis of human
> progress along several dimensions—practical, intellectual and
> moral—including:
>
> *Life:* Life expectancy is up, from a world average of less than 30 years
> in the mid-18th century to over 70 years today; and the increases are seen
> by all age groups and all continents. Child mortality and maternal
> mortality in particular have been drastically reduced: “for an American
> woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having
> breast cancer today.”
>
> *Health:* The threat of infectious disease has been greatly reduced via
> sanitization, sterilization, vaccination, antibiotics, and other scientific
> and medical advances, which together have saved billions of lives.
>
> *Sustenance:* Hunger and famine were a normal part of life throughout
> most of history. Today, people have access to, on average, over 2,500
> calories per day (including an average of 2,400 in India, 2,600 in Africa,
> and 3,100 in China). And the extra food isn’t all going to the wealthy;
> measures of stunted growth and undernourishment are declining in some of
> the world’s poorest regions, and worldwide deaths from famine are also
> down. Technology was critical in this achievement: mechanization of
> farming, synthetic fertilizer (thanks especially to the Haber-Bosch
> process ), better
> crop varieties (thanks to Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution), and now
> genetic engineering. The fall of Communism was also significant, since “of
> the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80
> percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization,
> punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.”
>
> *Wealth:* Gross World Product was stagnant or slowly growing for most of
> human history, but it has grown “almost two hundredfold from the start of
> the Enlightenment in the 18th century.” And again, the increases are not
> only seen in a minority of the world. Western countries pulled away from
> the rest first, starting in the 18th century, in what is known as the Great
> Escape (from the Malthusian trap
> ). Pinker attributes
> this achievement to science; institutions that create open economies by
> protecting rule of law, property rights, and enforceable contracts; and a
> change in values that conferred “dignity and prestige upon merchants and
> inventors rather than just on soldiers, priests, and courtiers.” But the
> Great Escape was followed in the 20th century by the Great Convergence, as
> poor countries around the world catch up in economic progress and close the
> gap. In all, the portion of the world living in “extreme poverty” (using
> the definition of $1.90/day in 2011 international dollars) has fallen from
> almost 90% in 1820 to 10% today.
>
> *Safety:* Deaths from virtually all kinds of accidents have drastically
> fallen. Deaths from motor vehicle accidents alone are down 24 times since
> 1921; pedestrian deaths and plane crashes are also down. Workplaces are
> safer. Deaths have decreased from falls, fire, drowning, you name it. Even
> 

Re: [FRIAM] (no subject)

[jon zingale]

EricS,

Thank you for the kind and thoughtful response. Your 'three levels'
project is interesting to me and reminds me (even if only tangentially)
of an analysis I worked on regarding food webs, n-species Lotka-Volterra,
and ABMs. I wanted to clarify for myself what each level of analysis
offered or bracketed relative to one another. There:

1. Food webs were analyzed as weighted graphs with the obvious Markov
chain interpretation[ρ]. Each edge effectively summarizing the complex
predator-prey interactions found at level 2, but without the plethora
of ODEs to solve.

2. N-species Lotka-Volterra, while being a jumble of equations, offered
dynamics. Here, one could get insight into how the static edge values
of level 1 were in fact fluctuating values in n-dimensional phase
space. But still, one is working with an aggregate model where species
is summarized wholly by population count.

3. ABMs, in theory, ought to be the whole story of individuals located
in space and time. There the agents (a lynx, say) 'decides' what to eat
based, perhaps, on what is most readily available. But as everyone on
the list knows, analysis at such a fine-grained scale is simply a mess.

I never did get as far with the analysis as I would have liked, and I
never got the chance to share my findings, so yeah, thanks for the
tangential opportunity, here and now, to say just this much.

1'. "site-rewrite rules in Walter Fontana’s site-graph abstractions"

Fleshing out some of your references, I found this Fontana paper[σ].
As you suggest, the style is fairly straightforward category theory.
Site-graphs and their morphisms form a well-defined category and a
number of universal constructions (push-outs, pullbacks, cospans,...)
are used to analyze the algebra and to establish its logic.

2'. "There is still an algebra of operation of reactions, but it is
simpler than the algebra of rules, and mostly about counting."

I am not entirely sure that I follow the distinction. Am I far off in
seeing an analogy here to the differences found between my one and two
above? I would love to have a facility with stochastic techniques like
these, but I most likely will need to remain a spectator for the rest
of my days. Occasionally, I meet LANL folk that can talk Feller and
Fokker with ease, and I am always jealous. It would be great to even
have a better understanding of where Lie groups (something I can at
least think about) meet the stochastic world.

3'. "So the state space is just a lattice. The “generator” from Level 2
is the generator of stochastic processes over this state space, and it
is where probability distributions live."

Please write more on this. By 'just a lattice' do you mean integer-valued
on account of the counts being so? Is the state space used to some
extent, like a modulii/classifying space, for characterizing the
species of reactions? I feel the fuzziest on how this level and the
2nd relate.

I am thankful to have had drinks with Artemy on a number of occasions,
though I am embarrassed to have never asked him to blow my mind, as he
could so easily have done.

I am working, slowly, through Valiant's discussion of evolvability
problems regarding monotone disjunction and parity. I will hopefully
have more to say soon. One thing that stands out for me is the idea
that Lamarck could be so right, but about the wrong thing, a concept
in search of a problem. While Lamarckism wasn't right for Darwin, it
was fine for perceptrons.

"""
If that intuition is valid, then the only things Selection could ever
rescue from chaos become those that get canalized into these ur-
developmental “programs”, with defined roles for genes, and merely
allelic variation within each role. I would like to find a formal way to
frame that assertion as a question and then solve it.
"""

Yes, that would be very exciting.

Cheers,
Jon

ps. I wrote Nick and Frank about a dream a day or two before your
post, where I found myself sitting with a figure that kept morphing
between Chris Kempes and Marcus. The figure was attempting to explain
a Turing complete ball game to me. I appreciate the synchronicity.

[ρ] Here, I mostly followed Levine's approach to computing trophic level.
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002251938090288X

[σ] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.00592.pdf



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[FRIAM] In the coldness of space...

[jon zingale]

In the coldest reaches of space, with what probability can I expect
there to be quantum Turing machines? A number of years ago, I ran across
a lecture by John Conway where he discusses the ubiquity of computers,
his thought experiment posits a large warehouse, full of transistors and
other electronic components, and a madman with a soldering iron. He then
goes on to say that for a sufficiently large warehouse, with probability
one, we should expect to find the universal machine.

I know that some on this list actually know about quantum computers, so
please let me know if this idea is terribly flawed somehow. To the extent
that such computers are out there, what would their architecture likely
be? In the meantime, I will continue to fantasize about the scaffoldings
that such computers may provide to the orderliness of what I can see.
Perhaps, this is covered by the Hooft paper on vacuum fluctuations?
I still need to read the paper.

Tags:
- Conway's madman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQUAwhhC8cU=2363s_channel=IstrailLaboratory

- Formation of hydrocarbon chains in interstellar space:
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-constraining-chemistry-carbon-chain-molecules-space.html



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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[thompnickson2]

Hi, Pieter,

 

I am tempted to say: 

 

“Yes.  But what have you done for me, LATELY?” [Joke}

 

And

 

I have always been suspicious of Pinker;  too much HAIR.  [worse joke]

 

And 

 

“But where’s the PROGRESS?”  [Even worse joke]

 

And

 

But is it sustainable?  [perhaps not a joke?]

 

But I am stalling.  Your argument is of the form, “Thompson, bugger your 
Jesuitical term splitting.  These things are PROGRESS and you damn well know 
it.”

 

I find that argument compelling. 

 

Nick 

 

Nick Thompson

  thompnicks...@gmail.com

  
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp
Sent: Tuesday, May 4, 2021 10:11 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

 

  I'd like to address a point Nick made earlier:

 

Well, the first step would be to make a distinction between "progress" and 
"change", with the former being a subset of the latter.  Now, the task is to 
see if there is any way to define "progress" transculturally.  For me, culture 
bound as I am, hand and foot, the wordprocessor program was progress because it 
made it easier to do the things I love to do, and facebook was regress because 
it demanded I do things I did not want to do.

 

I'm quoting from https://rootsofprogress.org/enlightenment-now, discussing 
Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now:


" the bulk of the book is devoted to an empirical analysis of human progress 
along several dimensions—practical, intellectual and moral—including:

Life: Life expectancy is up, from a world average of less than 30 years in the 
mid-18th century to over 70 years today; and the increases are seen by all age 
groups and all continents. Child mortality and maternal mortality in particular 
have been drastically reduced: “for an American woman, being pregnant a century 
ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.”

Health: The threat of infectious disease has been greatly reduced via 
sanitization, sterilization, vaccination, antibiotics, and other scientific and 
medical advances, which together have saved billions of lives.

Sustenance: Hunger and famine were a normal part of life throughout most of 
history. Today, people have access to, on average, over 2,500 calories per day 
(including an average of 2,400 in India, 2,600 in Africa, and 3,100 in China). 
And the extra food isn’t all going to the wealthy; measures of stunted growth 
and undernourishment are declining in some of the world’s poorest regions, and 
worldwide deaths from famine are also down. Technology was critical in this 
achievement: mechanization of farming, synthetic fertilizer (thanks especially 
to the   Haber-Bosch 
process), better crop varieties (thanks to Norman Borlaug and his Green 
Revolution), and now genetic engineering. The fall of Communism was also 
significant, since “of the seventy million people who died in major 
20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced 
collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.”

Wealth: Gross World Product was stagnant or slowly growing for most of human 
history, but it has grown “almost two hundredfold from the start of the 
Enlightenment in the 18th century.” And again, the increases are not only seen 
in a minority of the world. Western countries pulled away from the rest first, 
starting in the 18th century, in what is known as the Great Escape (from the  
 Malthusian trap). Pinker 
attributes this achievement to science; institutions that create open economies 
by protecting rule of law, property rights, and enforceable contracts; and a 
change in values that conferred “dignity and prestige upon merchants and 
inventors rather than just on soldiers, priests, and courtiers.” But the Great 
Escape was followed in the 20th century by the Great Convergence, as poor 
countries around the world catch up in economic progress and close the gap. In 
all, the portion of the world living in “extreme poverty” (using the definition 
of $1.90/day in 2011 international dollars) has fallen from almost 90% in 1820 
to 10% today.

Safety: Deaths from virtually all kinds of accidents have drastically fallen. 
Deaths from motor vehicle accidents alone are down 24 times since 1921; 
pedestrian deaths and plane crashes are also down. Workplaces are safer. Deaths 
have decreased from falls, fire, drowning, you name it. Even natural disasters 
kill fewer people than they used to, as better technology and practices make us 
safer from everything from earthquakes to lightning strikes.

Quality of life: Work hours have decreased from over 60 hours per week in both 
the US and Western Europe in 1870, to around 40 hours today. Housework has 
decreased from 58 hours per week in 1900 to 

Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[Marcus Daniels]

Reminds me over another author

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

On May 4, 2021, at 9:12 PM, Pieter Steenekamp  
wrote:


  I'd like to address a point Nick made earlier:

Well, the first step would be to make a distinction between "progress" and 
"change", with the former being a subset of the latter.  Now, the task is to 
see if there is any way to define "progress" transculturally.  For me, culture 
bound as I am, hand and foot, the wordprocessor program was progress because it 
made it easier to do the things I love to do, and facebook was regress because 
it demanded I do things I did not want to do.

I'm quoting from https://rootsofprogress.org/enlightenment-now, discussing 
Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now:

" the bulk of the book is devoted to an empirical analysis of human progress 
along several dimensions—practical, intellectual and moral—including:

Life: Life expectancy is up, from a world average of less than 30 years in the 
mid-18th century to over 70 years today; and the increases are seen by all age 
groups and all continents. Child mortality and maternal mortality in particular 
have been drastically reduced: “for an American woman, being pregnant a century 
ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.”

Health: The threat of infectious disease has been greatly reduced via 
sanitization, sterilization, vaccination, antibiotics, and other scientific and 
medical advances, which together have saved billions of lives.

Sustenance: Hunger and famine were a normal part of life throughout most of 
history. Today, people have access to, on average, over 2,500 calories per day 
(including an average of 2,400 in India, 2,600 in Africa, and 3,100 in China). 
And the extra food isn’t all going to the wealthy; measures of stunted growth 
and undernourishment are declining in some of the world’s poorest regions, and 
worldwide deaths from famine are also down. Technology was critical in this 
achievement: mechanization of farming, synthetic fertilizer (thanks especially 
to the Haber-Bosch 
process), better crop 
varieties (thanks to Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution), and now genetic 
engineering. The fall of Communism was also significant, since “of the seventy 
million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims 
of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and 
totalitarian central planning.”

Wealth: Gross World Product was stagnant or slowly growing for most of human 
history, but it has grown “almost two hundredfold from the start of the 
Enlightenment in the 18th century.” And again, the increases are not only seen 
in a minority of the world. Western countries pulled away from the rest first, 
starting in the 18th century, in what is known as the Great Escape (from the 
Malthusian trap). Pinker 
attributes this achievement to science; institutions that create open economies 
by protecting rule of law, property rights, and enforceable contracts; and a 
change in values that conferred “dignity and prestige upon merchants and 
inventors rather than just on soldiers, priests, and courtiers.” But the Great 
Escape was followed in the 20th century by the Great Convergence, as poor 
countries around the world catch up in economic progress and close the gap. In 
all, the portion of the world living in “extreme poverty” (using the definition 
of $1.90/day in 2011 international dollars) has fallen from almost 90% in 1820 
to 10% today.

Safety: Deaths from virtually all kinds of accidents have drastically fallen. 
Deaths from motor vehicle accidents alone are down 24 times since 1921; 
pedestrian deaths and plane crashes are also down. Workplaces are safer. Deaths 
have decreased from falls, fire, drowning, you name it. Even natural disasters 
kill fewer people than they used to, as better technology and practices make us 
safer from everything from earthquakes to lightning strikes.

Quality of life: Work hours have decreased from over 60 hours per week in both 
the US and Western Europe in 1870, to around 40 hours today. Housework has 
decreased from 58 hours per week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011, liberating 
everyone from drudge work, although owing to who historically has performed 
housework, this is in practice a great liberation of women. As a result, people 
report more hours of leisure, and more are retiring in old age. Not only our 
time but our money has been liberated: spending on necessities in the US is 
down from over 60% of disposable income in 1929 to about a third in 2016. And 
as a result of economic progress and better technology, people are doing more 
travel (including international travel), eating more varied and interesting 
diets, and have much greater access to the knowledge of the world.

Peace: In Pinker’s previous 
book, The 

Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[Prof David West]

Ahhh Nick,

Such limited vision. You may be correct vis-a-vis money (as nothing more than a 
pathological distortion — I have no experience) but are _so wrong_, at least 
potentially about sex. Like drugs, it can be a gateway to realms of knowledge, 
inter-personal and social connectivity, human and trans-human experience. 

davew


On Tue, May 4, 2021, at 9:42 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com 
 wrote:
> Dave,

>  

> No you can’t have read it.  Otherwise your life would have been completely 
> transformed because you would have come to belief that sex- and mone- seeking 
> are pathological distortions of human ambition. 

>  

> I pretty sure nobody has read it because, so far as I know, nobody has been 
> thus affected.  Ergo, …

>  

> Nick

> Nick Thompson

> thompnicks...@gmail.com

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  


> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Prof David West
> *Sent:* Tuesday, May 4, 2021 8:45 PM
> *To:* friam@redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

>  

> *Diamond Age: Or, A Young Woman's Illustrated Primer* by Neal Stephenson

>  

> Required reading for any discussion of economics when the robots produce 
> abundance, or things are too cheap to meter.

>  

> Nick won'ty read, pretty sure Steve and other already have.

>  

> davew

>  

>  

> On Tue, May 4, 2021, at 3:31 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

> > I'm glad I held back from throwing in my own $.002 on this topic

> > earlier... I like the general arc it is on and is being articulated much

> > more gesturally than I think I am capable of.   I can't say I *fully*

> > follow Glen's use of reduction and reconstruction in technical detail

> > well, but it suggests an abstraction that rings hopeful if not

> > (necessarily) true for me.

> > 

> > Given that my trite belief that "when the road hazards are coming at us

> > faster than we can see much less avoid, that we should pump the brakes

> > and downshift" is based in an inapt (inept?) metaphor, and that in any

> > case we aren't going to do a whole lot of self-limiting under the

> > current aesthetic we (mostly) share (pedal to the metal and let 'er

> > roar!).  

> > 

> > The Prepper/Survivalist community is mostly about trying to gather up

> > the resources they think will help them survive a crash or more

> > importantly the aftermath.   The post/transhumanists seem to be trying

> > to figure out how to strapon (or grow out of their own bodies') wings

> > and jet packs and road armor to escape or survive the inevitable crash.

> > 

> > Careening vehicle metaphors aside, I'm pleased to hear more and more

> > discussion that frames the economic aspect of "the culture war" as

> > *post* rather than *anti* capitalism.  Whether technology makes

> > *everything* too cheap to meter or not, I think the relative abundance

> > of manufactured goods as well as commodities for the top 50% of the

> > first world is confronting the *scarcity* model that was (maybe?)

> > necessary to keep the engine (oops, vehicles made it back in) of

> > consumerist markets accelerating.  

> > 

> > I am not sure that Yang has all (or even many) of the answers but I do

> > give him great credit for having promoted the question on the national

> > (and world?) stage with his run for President.   I had thought about UBI

> > and similar mechanisms before but somehow his presentation or affect or

> > maybe just timing brought it to me in a much more compelling way than

> > before.

> > 

> > I very much appreciate Glen's point about UBI being an intrinsically

> > capitalist proposal to try to keep their system going as long as

> > possible, I just hope we will use whatever time that buys us without

> > significant disruption to plan out what things might/could look like on

> > the other side of a revolution in (socioeconomic?) thinking that now

> > seem inevitable to me.When I used to ski (poorly), on any given run,

> > there was likely a brief period of time when I realized I as absolutely

> > going to crash and burn, and if I had any choice in the matter it was

> > whether I was going to do it earlier rather than later and whether I was

> > going to take a big bite of ice-slicked mogul, some off-run powder, or

> > maybe a tree.Maybe I'll just leap off a mogul and evaporate in the

> > sunlight mid-air (Kurzweil's Singularity)?

> > 

> > - Steve

> > 

> > On 5/4/21 12:52 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

> > > Reduction. All things in moderation, including moderation. Reduction is a 
> > > triumph, if it captures what you're looking for. And fiat currency has 
> > > done great things for the world, a cultural technology that allows us to 
> > > explore possibilities we wouldn't have otherwise explored. Financial 
> > > instruments have allowed us to spread ownership across demographics that 
> > > would never have been allowed based on real property.

> > >

> > > But those instruments are a reconstruction