Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Frank Wimberly]

Dave and Ed

Thanks for making me aware of the options. My plan is to stay in my present
house until the end.  This should be possible if I don't have a contagious
final illness.

Frank
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 10:26 AM Edward Angel  wrote:

> Most elder facilities do not require the huge buy in. In NM there are a
> large number of smaller facilities that can house up to ten people and are
> much less expensive. There are also larger ones that are pretty good that
> don’t have a buy in and charge less than 6K/month although are still out of
> reach for most New Mexicans.
>
> The largest outbreak in ABQ is at La Vida Llena which has the big buy in
> and high monthly charge. It is generally regarded as the best facility in
> ABQ. It is run as a nonprofit by some the large mainstream churches. I have
> three friends there. The outbreak there that affected over 50 residents and
> staff was in the skilled nursing part of the facility and thus far has not
> affected independent living residents like my friends who are however under
> a pretty strict quarantine. I think the main point here is that wherever
> people put together in a small space there is grave danger.
>
> Ed
> ___
>
> Ed Angel
>
> Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory
> (ARTS Lab)
> Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico
>
> 1017 Sierra Pinon
> Santa Fe, NM 87501
> 505-984-0136 (home)   an...@cs.unm.edu
> 505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel
>
> On May 4, 2020, at 8:25 AM, Prof David West  wrote:
>
> Frank,
>
> When looking for a facility for my mother, I found a lot of the 200K / 6K
> per month facilities, but more than 3/4 of the facilities that exist are
> subsidized and they simply take between 40 and 80% of the patient's social
> security and retirement income.
>
> I am pretty certain that the ones with intense outbreaks were the latter
> type.
>
> When all the shouting is over and all the data is available, I would bet a
> significant amount of money that the single largest comorbidity factor will
> be poverty / lower economic status.
>
> davew
>
> On Mon, May 4, 2020, at 6:12 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>
> Dave
>
> Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the
> ones I know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month.
> Maybe you mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."
>
> Frank
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West  wrote:
>
>
> The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are
> somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you
> don't have to lock down.
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>
> Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you
> don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that
> approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of
> covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no
> known covid involvement.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff 
> wrote:
>
> Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday
> morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for
> those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in
> Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries
> that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the
> elderly who primarily live together in retirement).
>
> As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s
> relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its
> schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of
> the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, *Anders
> Tegnell*, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s
> working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the
> world.
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
>
> Colleagues,
>
>
>
> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?
>
>
>
>
> You recall that I invoked as a 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Edward Angel]

Most elder facilities do not require the huge buy in. In NM there are a large 
number of smaller facilities that can house up to ten people and are much less 
expensive. There are also larger ones that are pretty good that don’t have a 
buy in and charge less than 6K/month although are still out of reach for most 
New Mexicans.

The largest outbreak in ABQ is at La Vida Llena which has the big buy in and 
high monthly charge. It is generally regarded as the best facility in ABQ. It 
is run as a nonprofit by some the large mainstream churches. I have three 
friends there. The outbreak there that affected over 50 residents and staff was 
in the skilled nursing part of the facility and thus far has not affected 
independent living residents like my friends who are however under a pretty 
strict quarantine. I think the main point here is that wherever people put 
together in a small space there is grave danger. 

Ed
___

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home) an...@cs.unm.edu 

505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 


> On May 4, 2020, at 8:25 AM, Prof David West  wrote:
> 
> Frank,
> 
> When looking for a facility for my mother, I found a lot of the 200K / 6K per 
> month facilities, but more than 3/4 of the facilities that exist are 
> subsidized and they simply take between 40 and 80% of the patient's social 
> security and retirement income.
> 
> I am pretty certain that the ones with intense outbreaks were the latter type.
> 
> When all the shouting is over and all the data is available, I would bet a 
> significant amount of money that the single largest comorbidity factor will 
> be poverty / lower economic status.
> 
> davew
> 
> On Mon, May 4, 2020, at 6:12 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> Dave
>> 
>> Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the ones 
>> I know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month.  Maybe 
>> you mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."
>> 
>> Frank
>> 
>> ---
>> Frank C. Wimberly
>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>> 
>> 505 670-9918
>> Santa Fe, NM
>> 
>> On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West > > wrote:
>> 
>> The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are 
>> somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you 
>> don't have to lock down.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>>> Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you 
>>> don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that 
>>> approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of 
>>> covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no 
>>> known covid involvement.
>>> 
>>> ---
>>> Frank C. Wimberly
>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>> 
>>> 505 670-9918
>>> Santa Fe, NM
>>> 
>>> On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff >> > wrote:
>>> Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday 
>>> morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for 
>>> those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in 
>>> Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries 
>>> that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the 
>>> elderly who primarily live together in retirement).
>>> 
>>> As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s 
>>> relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its 
>>> schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of 
>>> the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders 
>>> Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s 
>>> working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the 
>>> world.
>>> 
>>> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM >> > wrote:
>>> Colleagues, 
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and 
>>> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly 
>>> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in 
>>> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go 
>>> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are 
>>> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy 
>>> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of 
>>> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> You recall that I 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[thompnickson2]

…and being on a ventilator.  

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Monday, May 4, 2020 8:25 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

Frank,

 

When looking for a facility for my mother, I found a lot of the 200K / 6K per 
month facilities, but more than 3/4 of the facilities that exist are subsidized 
and they simply take between 40 and 80% of the patient's social security and 
retirement income.

 

I am pretty certain that the ones with intense outbreaks were the latter type.

 

When all the shouting is over and all the data is available, I would bet a 
significant amount of money that the single largest comorbidity factor will be 
poverty / lower economic status.

 

davew

 

On Mon, May 4, 2020, at 6:12 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Dave

 

Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the ones I 
know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month.  Maybe you 
mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."

 

Frank

 

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West mailto:profw...@fastmail.fm> > wrote:

 

The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are somewhat 
poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you don't have to 
lock down.

 

 

 

On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you don't 
have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that approach.  In 
the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of covid related 
causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no known covid 
involvement.

 

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff mailto:merlelefk...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday 
morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for those 
of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the 
answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked 
down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily 
live together in retirement).

 

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s 
relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its 
schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the 
pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the 
Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his 
country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

 

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good 
reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this 
economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human 
activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars 
and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It 
seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present 
status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically 
rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put 
in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to 
see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  
Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a 
competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of 
thousands.  

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not 
understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> 

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

 

 

 

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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

 

 

-- 

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.

President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy

emergentdiplomacy.org <http://emergentd

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

Frank,

When looking for a facility for my mother, I found a lot of the 200K / 6K per 
month facilities, but more than 3/4 of the facilities that exist are subsidized 
and they simply take between 40 and 80% of the patient's social security and 
retirement income.

I am pretty certain that the ones with intense outbreaks were the latter type.

When all the shouting is over and all the data is available, I would bet a 
significant amount of money that the single largest comorbidity factor will be 
poverty / lower economic status.

davew

On Mon, May 4, 2020, at 6:12 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Dave
> 
> Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the ones I 
> know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month. Maybe you 
> mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."
> 
> Frank
> 
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
> On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West  wrote:
>> __
>> The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are 
>> somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you 
>> don't have to lock down.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>>> Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you 
>>> don't have to lock down. As an old person I have my doubts about that 
>>> approach. In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of 
>>> covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no 
>>> known covid involvement.
>>> 
>>> ---
>>> Frank C. Wimberly
>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>> 
>>> 505 670-9918
>>> Santa Fe, NM
>>> 
>>> On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff  wrote:
 Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday 
 morning. Below is part of this morning's report. Not surprisingly (for 
 those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in 
 Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries 
 that are locked down, with one exception. More deaths (mostly among the 
 elderly who primarily live together in retirement).
 
 As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s 
 relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its 
 schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of 
 the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, *Anders 
 Tegnell*, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s 
 working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the 
 world.
 
 On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
> Colleagues, 

> __ __

> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and 
> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly 
> is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference 
> in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can 
> go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are 
> reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy 
> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of 
> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to 
> do? 

> __ __

> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats 
> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and 
> protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above 
> two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same 
> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population 
> of tens of thousands. 

> __ __

> Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not 
> understand? 

> __ __

> Nick 

> __ __

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> ThompNickSon2@gmail.com

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

> 

> __ __

> __ __

> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... 
>  . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 
 
 
 -- 
 Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
 President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
 emergentdiplomacy.org
 Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
 
 merlelefk...@gmail.com 
 mobile: (303) 859-5609
 skype: merle.lelfkoff2
 twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
 .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Frank Wimberly]

Dave

Maybe I lack adequate knowledge of the variety of care centers but the ones
I know charge something like $200,000 admission and $6000 per month.  Maybe
you mean "somewhat poor OR already warehoused..."

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 5:31 AM Prof David West  wrote:

> The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are
> somewhat poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you
> don't have to lock down.
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>
> Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you
> don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that
> approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of
> covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no
> known covid involvement.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff 
> wrote:
>
> Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday
> morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for
> those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in
> Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries
> that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the
> elderly who primarily live together in retirement).
>
> As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s
> relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its
> schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of
> the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, *Anders
> Tegnell*, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s
> working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the
> world.
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
>
> Colleagues,
>
>
>
> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
> do?
>
>
>
> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were
> put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
> of tens of thousands.
>
>
>
> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
> understand?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>  . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
> --
> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
> President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
> emergentdiplomacy.org
> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
>
> merlelefk...@gmail.com 
> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
> twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
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> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
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> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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>
>
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>
.-. .- -. -.. --- -- 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

The lesson might be if you are willing to lose the old people who are somewhat 
poor and already warehoused in overcrowded care facilities you don't have to 
lock down.



On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you don't 
> have to lock down. As an old person I have my doubts about that approach. In 
> the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of covid related 
> causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no known covid 
> involvement.
> 
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
> On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff  wrote:
>> Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday 
>> morning. Below is part of this morning's report. Not surprisingly (for those 
>> of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the 
>> answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked 
>> down, with one exception. More deaths (mostly among the elderly who 
>> primarily live together in retirement).
>> 
>> As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s 
>> relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its 
>> schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the 
>> pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, *Anders Tegnell*, 
>> the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and 
>> whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.
>> 
>> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
>>> Colleagues, 

>>> __ __

>>> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and 
>>> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is 
>>> this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in 
>>> human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go 
>>> to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are 
>>> reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and 
>>> our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people 
>>> frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 

>>> __ __

>>> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were 
>>> put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and 
>>> protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two 
>>> hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, 
>>> a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens 
>>> of thousands. 

>>> __ __

>>> Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not 
>>> understand? 

>>> __ __

>>> Nick 

>>> __ __

>>> Nicholas Thompson

>>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>>> Clark University

>>> ThompNickSon2@gmail.com

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

>>> 

>>> __ __

>>> __ __

>>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... 
>>>  . ...
>>>  FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>>  Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
>>>  unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>>  archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>>>  FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
>> President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
>> emergentdiplomacy.org
>> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
>> 
>> merlelefk...@gmail.com 
>> mobile: (303) 859-5609
>> skype: merle.lelfkoff2
>> twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... 
>>  . ...
>>  FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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>>  unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>  archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>>  FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... 
>  . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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> 
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[David Eric Smith]

Hi Gary,

I would put up this one as a constructive reply to your link below, not to 
counter but to add alongside:
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/
 

I am pretty sure I have posted this to the list in the past, but it remains a 
strong reference for me. 

Six weeks or two months into a shutdown, with pictures of glittering 
skyscrapers in NYC with nobody maintaining them, and yoga people sitting on 
posh porches overlooking the forest, I get the impression that something is 
being overlooked.  If I saw the same video made by a Panamanian immigrant in 
Brooklyn, living with 6 family members in a small apartment, I would feel safer 
abducting from the anecdotal point of view to a generalization.

I don’t say that to disagree with the intent of the short video you circulated, 
which expresses preferences that I also hold.  But all the ways we create 
damage, from climate to farmland management to ecosystem destruction happen 
partly because it is hard to understand long-term trajectories from the early 
stages of transients, and we are particularly bad at recognizing that 
transients are that.  This little bit of inertia, while people consume stocks 
that were in inventory already, does not look to me like a model for an 
alternative steady state in barely any respects (though still a few).  I don’t 
doubt that the maker of the video understands this and would agree, but he 
probably sees the end of making the point as justifying the means of omitting 
these things.

I like the Cuban case because it starts to get into the weeds of just how much 
_work_ is needed, and how many and how diverse are the problems that require 
invention to solve, to significantly re-arrange a social system.  I think the 
documentary makes the case that the move they made was entirely in the right 
direction.  The thing that makes it feel real to me is that it was a lot of 
work for a modest and very incomplete improvement.  To make a good world will 
require that kind of work-for-change as a way of life to which we remain 
committed over generational timescales.  It also required that the center of 
mass of the society be going in that direction, and not just a committed fringe 
swimming against a current that is all going the wrong way.  The latter nut is 
one that is seeming particularly hard to crack.

Many thanks,

Eric


> On May 3, 2020, at 10:05 PM, Gary Schiltz  wrote:
> 
> Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this 
> five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not... 
> https://vimeo.com/411278238 
> 
> On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith  > wrote:
> I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and 
> anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for Less is More.
> 
> I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the society has to 
> sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much 
> of what.  A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has 
> enormous inertia.  Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of 
> systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other 
> systems in place to do as an alternative.
> 
> Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, 
> and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to 
> dollar-wealth.  But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are 
> produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to 
> the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) 
> turnaround times.  (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent 
> commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive 
> value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure where 
> near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis is 
> needed.  For now I will just look at the simple one.
> 
> We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops.  We don’t 
> own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that 
> in a system that over-produces already.  So the production is there.  But if 
> we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby 
> businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us 
> anything to eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is 
> only one man, so he could give the rest away because people need it.”  But he 
> isn’t only one man.  He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous 
> capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for 
> fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns over the 
> crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Steven A Smith]

Eric -
> I would put up this one as a constructive reply to your link below,
> not to counter but to add alongside:
> https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/
> I am pretty sure I have posted this to the list in the past, but it
> remains a strong reference for me.

I was (only vaguely) aware of the Cuban "special period" and think the
description of the Cuban people's response in the movie was very
inspirational.  It helps a great deal that Cuba has a very good climate
for year round agriculture and that it's people were not terribly
addicted to personal-conveniences as provided by our idea of modern
technology.   I have not really paid attention to what has evolved there
more recently.

I have friends/colleagues in Ukraine who are old enough to have
remembered both Chernobyl, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the
Ukranian independence.   They went through some similar experiences to
Cuba, suddenly not having direct access to the huge false-economies of
the Soviet Empire and having to try to keep a system running on
nominally only what could be produced regionally.

I wondered when Puerto Rico got hit so hard by the hurricane a few years
go if THEY might not follow a pattern closer to Cuba's as described in
the movie.

> Six weeks or two months into a shutdown, with pictures of glittering
> skyscrapers in NYC with nobody maintaining them, and yoga people
> sitting on posh porches overlooking the forest, I get the impression
> that something is being overlooked.  If I saw the same video made by a
> Panamanian immigrant in Brooklyn, living with 6 family members in a
> small apartment, I would feel safer abducting from the anecdotal point
> of view to a generalization.
I agree that Gary's video leaves me waiting for "the other shoe to fall"
when I know the beast in question is more like a centipede than a biped.
>
> I don’t say that to disagree with the intent of the short video you
> circulated, which expresses preferences that I also hold.  But all the
> ways we create damage, from climate to farmland management to
> ecosystem destruction happen partly because it is hard to understand
> long-term trajectories from the early stages of transients, and we are
> particularly bad at recognizing that transients are that.  This little
> bit of inertia, while people consume stocks that were in inventory
> already, does not look to me like a model for an alternative steady
> state in barely any respects (though still a few).  I don’t doubt that
> the maker of the video understands this and would agree, but he
> probably sees the end of making the point as justifying the means of
> omitting these things.
Yes, in spite of our just-in-time logistics system, there has been quite
a bit of product in the pipeline and it is not like *every* factory and
*every* packing plant, etc.  shut down immediately or entirely *IF
EVER*.   Your reference to the style of glossing in the movie is
well-taken and I think I agree it was deliberate and aspirational more
than pretending that (as you point out) that 2 months in we can *know*
that everything is going to be OK even (especially?) if we cut our manic
hypercapitalism by a factor of 2 or 10.
>
> I like the Cuban case because it starts to get into the weeds of just
> how much _work_ is needed, and how many and how diverse are the
> problems that require invention to solve, to significantly re-arrange
> a social system.  I think the documentary makes the case that the move
> they made was entirely in the right direction.
The improvements in health and nutrition they report is a good indicator.
>  The thing that makes it feel real to me is that it was a lot of work
> for a modest and very incomplete improvement.  To make a good world
> will require that kind of work-for-change as a way of life to which we
> remain committed over generational timescales.  It also required that
> the center of mass of the society be going in that direction, and not
> just a committed fringe swimming against a current that is all going
> the wrong way.  The latter nut is one that is seeming particularly
> hard to crack.

But I would claim/suggest that a "catastrophe" like the one we are on
the crest (of the beginning?) of is a good opportunity, not unlike the
"Special Period" of Cuba, for that center of mass to shift perhaps.  
And there are directions to lean that will help that or alternatively
hurt (return to normal) that.

Good video and good thoughts,

 - Steve


>
> Many thanks,
>
> Eric
>
>
>> On May 3, 2020, at 10:05 PM, Gary Schiltz > > wrote:
>>
>> Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone
>> watched this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not...
>> https://vimeo.com/411278238
>>
>> On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith > > wrote:
>>
>> I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything
>> in it, and anything I try 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Merle Lefkoff]

Gary, he's on CNN (Cable) on Sunday mornings.  I'm not sure how to get it
anywhere later.

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 11:03 AM Gary Schiltz 
wrote:

> Merle, I'd like to watch that interview. Do you watch Fareed over cable or
> satellite, or over the internet?
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 11:55 AM Merle Lefkoff 
> wrote:
>
>> Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on
>> Sunday morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly
>> (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in
>> Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries
>> that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the
>> elderly who primarily live together in retirement).
>>
>> As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19,
>> Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has
>> left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the
>> spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, 
>> *Anders
>> Tegnell*, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s
>> working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the
>> world.
>>
>> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
>>
>>> Colleagues,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear
>>> and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What
>>> exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the
>>> difference in human activity between our present state and a revived
>>> economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the
>>> economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a
>>> “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more
>>> than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t
>>> really need to do?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats
>>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
>>> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
>>> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
>>> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
>>> of tens of thousands.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
>>> understand?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Nick
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Nicholas Thompson
>>>
>>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>>
>>> Clark University
>>>
>>> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>>>
>>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .-
>>> ...  . ...
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
>>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
>> President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
>> emergentdiplomacy.org
>> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
>> merlelefk...@gmail.com 
>> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
>> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
>> twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>>  . ...
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>  . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
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> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>


-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
merlelefk...@gmail.com 
mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...  
. ...
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz]

David, thanks for your thoughtful response. The film does present a very
simplified, and probably elitist and naive view. I will have a look at the
film you referenced and reflect my thoughts back here.

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 4:49 PM David Eric Smith  wrote:

> Hi Gary,
>
> I would put up this one as a constructive reply to your link below, not to
> counter but to add alongside:
>
> https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/
> I am pretty sure I have posted this to the list in the past, but it
> remains a strong reference for me.
>


> Six weeks or two months into a shutdown, with pictures of glittering
> skyscrapers in NYC with nobody maintaining them, and yoga people sitting on
> posh porches overlooking the forest, I get the impression that something is
> being overlooked.  If I saw the same video made by a Panamanian immigrant
> in Brooklyn, living with 6 family members in a small apartment, I would
> feel safer abducting from the anecdotal point of view to a generalization.
>
> I don’t say that to disagree with the intent of the short video you
> circulated, which expresses preferences that I also hold.  But all the ways
> we create damage, from climate to farmland management to ecosystem
> destruction happen partly because it is hard to understand long-term
> trajectories from the early stages of transients, and we are particularly
> bad at recognizing that transients are that.  This little bit of inertia,
> while people consume stocks that were in inventory already, does not look
> to me like a model for an alternative steady state in barely any respects
> (though still a few).  I don’t doubt that the maker of the video
> understands this and would agree, but he probably sees the end of making
> the point as justifying the means of omitting these things.
>
> I like the Cuban case because it starts to get into the weeds of just how
> much _work_ is needed, and how many and how diverse are the problems that
> require invention to solve, to significantly re-arrange a social system.  I
> think the documentary makes the case that the move they made was entirely
> in the right direction.  The thing that makes it feel real to me is that it
> was a lot of work for a modest and very incomplete improvement.  To make a
> good world will require that kind of work-for-change as a way of life to
> which we remain committed over generational timescales.  It also required
> that the center of mass of the society be going in that direction, and not
> just a committed fringe swimming against a current that is all going the
> wrong way.  The latter nut is one that is seeming particularly hard to
> crack.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Eric
>
>
> On May 3, 2020, at 10:05 PM, Gary Schiltz 
> wrote:
>
> Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched
> this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not...
> https://vimeo.com/411278238
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith 
> wrote:
>
>> I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it,
>> and anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for Less is More.
>>
>> I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the society has
>> to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how
>> much of what.  A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has
>> enormous inertia.  Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of
>> systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other
>> systems in place to do as an alternative.
>>
>> Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively
>> inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to
>> dollar-wealth.  But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are
>> produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered
>> to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible)
>> turnaround times.  (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent
>> commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive
>> value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure
>> where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis
>> is needed.  For now I will just look at the simple one.
>>
>> We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops.  We
>> don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to
>> do that in a system that over-produces already.  So the production is
>> there.  But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a
>> grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why
>> should he give us anything to eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough
>> to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because
>> people need it.”  But he isn’t only one man.  He is a vastly debt-leveraged
>> operation, with enormous capital replacement and 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Frank Wimberly]

Sounds like the lesson is that if you're willing to lose old people you
don't have to lock down.  As an old person I have my doubts about that
approach.  In the last three days one of my highschool classmates died of
covid related causes and a first cousin died of a heart attack with no
known covid involvement.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, May 3, 2020, 10:55 AM Merle Lefkoff  wrote:

> Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday
> morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for
> those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in
> Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries
> that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the
> elderly who primarily live together in retirement).
>
> As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s
> relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its
> schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of
> the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, *Anders
> Tegnell*, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s
> working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the
> world.
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
>
>> Colleagues,
>>
>>
>>
>> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
>> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
>> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
>> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
>> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
>> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
>> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
>> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
>> do?
>>
>>
>>
>> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats
>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
>> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
>> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
>> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
>> of tens of thousands.
>>
>>
>>
>> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
>> understand?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>>  . ...
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>
>
>
> --
> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
> President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
> emergentdiplomacy.org
> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
> merlelefk...@gmail.com 
> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
> twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>  . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...  
. ...
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz]

Merle, I'd like to watch that interview. Do you watch Fareed over cable or
satellite, or over the internet?

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 11:55 AM Merle Lefkoff 
wrote:

> Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday
> morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for
> those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in
> Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries
> that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the
> elderly who primarily live together in retirement).
>
> As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s
> relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its
> schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of
> the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, *Anders
> Tegnell*, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s
> working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the
> world.
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
>
>> Colleagues,
>>
>>
>>
>> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
>> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
>> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
>> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
>> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
>> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
>> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
>> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
>> do?
>>
>>
>>
>> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats
>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
>> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
>> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
>> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
>> of tens of thousands.
>>
>>
>>
>> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
>> understand?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>>  . ...
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>
>
>
> --
> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
> President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
> emergentdiplomacy.org
> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
> merlelefk...@gmail.com 
> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
> twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
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>  . ...
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> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
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. ...
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz]

Sorry Steve, I quoted the Wrong Wrant :-) Rest assured, though, that it was
my intention to complement Your Rant. David, your rant was good as well.

Always the diplomat,
Gary

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 11:53 AM Steven A Smith  wrote:

> Gary -
>
> Watching now... but THIS rant was Eric's not mine... mine was previous and
> more rambly!
>
> - Steve
>
> Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched
> this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not...
> https://vimeo.com/411278238
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith 
> wrote:
>
>> I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it,
>> and anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for Less is More.
>>
>> I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the society has
>> to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how
>> much of what.  A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has
>> enormous inertia.  Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of
>> systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other
>> systems in place to do as an alternative.
>>
>> Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively
>> inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to
>> dollar-wealth.  But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are
>> produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered
>> to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible)
>> turnaround times.  (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent
>> commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive
>> value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure
>> where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis
>> is needed.  For now I will just look at the simple one.
>>
>> We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops.  We
>> don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to
>> do that in a system that over-produces already.  So the production is
>> there.  But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a
>> grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why
>> should he give us anything to eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough
>> to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because
>> people need it.”  But he isn’t only one man.  He is a vastly debt-leveraged
>> operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge
>> loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns
>> over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of
>> Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both).  So he has no
>> choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no
>> money.  But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on
>> 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed?  Some system
>> has to work that out.
>>
>> During the near-century of technological increases in output
>> optimization, the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce
>> consumables, people’s efforts would be liberated to do other good things.
>> But to the extent that those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense
>> like food is (following Steve S.), really all those other people are
>> useless.
>>
>> One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed
>> communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within
>> much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I
>> don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions.  So we are
>> left with an unsolved problem of distribution.  Not least, just How do we
>> coordinate it?  But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is
>> perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to
>> being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different
>> things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).
>>
>> Take any other area.  Gas-powered transportation.  Well, maybe you don’t
>> “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work
>> close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc.  But where you
>> are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically
>> committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that
>> whole “unnecessary” system.  So some part of the economic inertia comes
>> just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which
>> leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated
>> services.
>>
>> Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V?  Coil some wire to
>> make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire.  Sudden
>> shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in
>> addition to whatever may have 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Merle Lefkoff]

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday
morning.  Below is part of this morning's report.  Not surprisingly (for
those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in
Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries
that are locked down, with one exception.  More deaths (mostly among the
elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s
relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its
schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of
the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, *Anders
Tegnell*, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s
working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the
world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
>
>
> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
> do?
>
>
>
> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were
> put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
> of tens of thousands.
>
>
>
> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
> understand?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>  . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>


-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
merlelefk...@gmail.com 
mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...  
. ...
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Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Steven A Smith]

Gary -

Watching now... but THIS rant was Eric's not mine... mine was previous
and more rambly!

- Steve

> Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched
> this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not...
> https://vimeo.com/411278238
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith  > wrote:
>
> I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything
> in it, and anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for
> Less is More.
>
> I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the
> society has to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a
> right to consume how much of what.  A surprising amount of
> structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia.  Part of
> what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to
> be doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place
> to do as an alternative.
>
> Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively
> inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another,
> compared to dollar-wealth.  But over the past 80 years, nearly all
> food calories are produced by very few decision makers and
> enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, on
> really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times.
>  (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity
> meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive
> value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in
> structure where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a
> different analysis is needed.  For now I will just look at the
> simple one.
>
> We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie
> crops.  We don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there
> is no easy angle to do that in a system that over-produces
> already.  So the production is there.  But if we don’t have a way
> to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman more
> than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us
> anything to eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live,
> and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because
> people need it.”  But he isn’t only one man.  He is a vastly
> debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital replacement and
> maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and
> no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain
> price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the
> difference; what happens is a lot of both).  So he has no choices
> if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no
> money.  But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US
> operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to
> be fed?  Some system has to work that out.  
>
> During the near-century of technological increases in output
> optimization, the rhetoric was that with less labor used to
> produce consumables, people’s efforts would be liberated to do
> other good things.  But to the extent that those things aren’t
> “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve S.),
> really all those other people are useless.  
>
> One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally
> managed communist economies, but apart from small-scale
> experiments on UBI within much larger conventionally-run
> countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see evidence of
> mechanisms to put behind those visions.  So we are left with an
> unsolved problem of distribution.  Not least, just How do we
> coordinate it?  But also how do we do so stably enough that the
> system is perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close
> enough to “fair”, to being individually negotiated and thus
> allowing people to want different things, all the marginalist Econ
> stuff).
>
> Take any other area.  Gas-powered transportation.  Well, maybe you
> don’t “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where
> you live and work close together and have support for
> walk/bike/pubtrans etc.  But where you are now, you and almost
> everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being
> unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole
> “unnecessary” system.  So some part of the economic inertia comes
> just from the thick web of these commitments that people have
> made, which leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on
> lots of complicated services.
>
> Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V?  Coil some
> wire to make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the
> wire.  Sudden shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just
> from the timescale, in 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Merle Lefkoff]

No, Frank, the PRESENT economy might collapse, not the economy.  The word
"economy" comes from the Greek for "house" and "manage".  Nothing about the
present economy suggest household management.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:47 AM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> Nick,
>
> I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would
> collapse.
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
>
>> Colleagues,
>>
>>
>>
>> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
>> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
>> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
>> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
>> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
>> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
>> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
>> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
>> do?
>>
>>
>>
>> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats
>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
>> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
>> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
>> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
>> of tens of thousands.
>>
>>
>>
>> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
>> understand?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>>  . ...
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>
>
>
> --
> Frank Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 505 670-9918
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
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> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
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> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>


-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
merlelefk...@gmail.com 
mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...  
. ...
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[David Eric Smith]

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and 
anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for Less is More.

I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the society has to sort 
out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what. 
 A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia.  
Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to be 
doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to do as an 
alternative.

Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, 
and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth.  
But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are produced by very few 
decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, 
on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times.  (This means 
Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity meats.). The story is a 
little more diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits, vegetables, et 
al.), but different in structure where near-slave labor takes the place of 
capital and a different analysis is needed.  For now I will just look at the 
simple one.

We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops.  We don’t 
own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that 
in a system that over-produces already.  So the production is there.  But if we 
don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman 
more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us anything to 
eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is only one man, 
so he could give the rest away because people need it.”  But he isn’t only one 
man.  He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital 
replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, 
and no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain price 
ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the difference; what 
happens is a lot of both).  So he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we 
have no choices if we have no money.  But then what should anyone pay any of us 
for if the US operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to 
be fed?  Some system has to work that out.  

During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, the 
rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts 
would be liberated to do other good things.  But to the extent that those 
things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve 
S.), really all those other people are useless.  

One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed 
communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within much 
larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see 
evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions.  So we are left with an 
unsolved problem of distribution.  Not least, just How do we coordinate it?  
But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is perceived as having 
some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being individually 
negotiated and thus allowing people to want different things, all the 
marginalist Econ stuff).

Take any other area.  Gas-powered transportation.  Well, maybe you don’t “need” 
it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work close 
together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc.  But where you are now, 
you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being 
unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole “unnecessary” 
system.  So some part of the economic inertia comes just from the thick web of 
these commitments that people have made, which leave them unable to withdraw 
from dependencies on lots of complicated services.

Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V?  Coil some wire to make 
an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire.  Sudden shifts of 
anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in addition to 
whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.


If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one principle, 
and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and adequately 
stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second, are two broad 
“primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a vast depth of 
smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated since the Industrial Age, 
in supply chains, transportation, management, law, etc.  It’s a hard web to 
change fast without a lot of chaos that drowns a lot of people.  

However bad it was during the last depression, city people still could go back 
to the farms, because there there was food, and 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[thompnickson2]

Hi, Eric, 

 

Thanks.  I am going to study on this.  Not only does it show that less is more 
but also that mess has lure.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2020 6:23 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and 
anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for Less is More.

 

I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the society has to sort 
out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what. 
 A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia.  
Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to be 
doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to do as an 
alternative.

 

Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, 
and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth.  
But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are produced by very few 
decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, 
on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times.  (This means 
Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity meats.). The story is a 
little more diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits, vegetables, et 
al.), but different in structure where near-slave labor takes the place of 
capital and a different analysis is needed.  For now I will just look at the 
simple one.

 

We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops.  We don’t 
own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that 
in a system that over-produces already.  So the production is there.  But if we 
don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman 
more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us anything to 
eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is only one man, 
so he could give the rest away because people need it.”  But he isn’t only one 
man.  He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital 
replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, 
and no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain price 
ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the difference; what 
happens is a lot of both).  So he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we 
have no choices if we have no money.  But then what should anyone pay any of us 
for if the US operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to 
be fed?  Some system has to work that out.  

 

During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, the 
rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts 
would be liberated to do other good things.  But to the extent that those 
things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve 
S.), really all those other people are useless.  

 

One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed 
communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within much 
larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see 
evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions.  So we are left with an 
unsolved problem of distribution.  Not least, just How do we coordinate it?  
But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is perceived as having 
some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being individually 
negotiated and thus allowing people to want different things, all the 
marginalist Econ stuff).

 

Take any other area.  Gas-powered transportation.  Well, maybe you don’t “need” 
it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work close 
together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc.  But where you are now, 
you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being 
unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole “unnecessary” 
system.  So some part of the economic inertia comes just from the thick web of 
these commitments that people have made, which leave them unable to withdraw 
from dependencies on lots of complicated services.

 

Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V?  Coil some wire to make 
an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire.  Sudden shifts of 
anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in addition to 
whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.

 

 

If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as o

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

Father Smith was a "liberation theologian," pacifist, and activist as well as a 
Catholic priest. On the population-war issue we had some fun conversations 
about whether or not contraception should be used as war/violence preventative 
measure.

He and I traveled to Cuba in the 90s and tried very very hard to get arrested 
upon our return (to protest the US embargo), but the immigration and customs 
personnel at the Minneapolis airport refused to cooperate. Although it was 
legal (barely) for US citizens to go to Cuba, it was illegal to spend money 
there. I brought back, and declared, several hundred dollars in Cuban cigars, 
rum, and art goods. Both immigration and customs personnel looked at the form 
and my luggage, visibly sighed and waived us through instead of arresting us.

Fun times.
davew


On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 7:43 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> Nick,
> 
> No one made any claim about effectiveness. Just an observation that if you do 
> year-by-year plot of birthrate in a given population you will see an annual 
> increase leading to the onset of a war, an obvious decrease during the war, 
> and a surge immediately after the war ends. The surge more than compensates 
> for the drop during the war years, so effectiveness is out the window.
> 
> I think — haven't checked recently — that there was a gradual increase in 
> birth rate between WWI and the onset of WWII, a 2-4 percent decrease during 
> the war years, and a huge baby boom immediately after. Father Smith had 
> similar statistical measures for dozens of other conflicts.
> 
> Population pressure / "birth control" are but one of a multitude of factors 
> that lead to war. All kinds of arguments can be made about the "validity" of 
> Father Smith's statistics — few pre-modern peoples kept comprehensive public 
> health records, ...
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 11:21 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
>> David,

>> 

>> Basic fact of demography. Killing men is not a particularly effective means 
>> of population control. 

>> 

>> You want war to serve in that capacity, you have to get women in the 
>> military. 

>> 

>> Nick

>> 

>> Nicholas Thompson

>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>> Clark University

>> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> 

>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Steven A Smith
>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 8:00 PM
>> *To:* friam@redfish.com
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>> 

>> 

>> Dave -

>>> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
>>> Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — 
>>> since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

>> Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and 
>> *reduction*?

>> The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much 
>> warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing 
>> the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, 
>> inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. 
>> Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic 
>> heritage of Genghis Khan...

>> One step more sophisticated than the rats?

>> I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want 
>> their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the 
>> grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.

>> - Steve

>>>> Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” 
>>>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
>>>>  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst 
>>>> sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the 
>>>> Calhoun experiment on p 224.

>>>> 

>>>> Nick

>>>> 

>>>> Nicholas Thompson

>>>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>>>> Clark University

>>>> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

>>>> 

>>>> 

>>>> 

>>>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels

>>>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM

>>>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>>> 

>>>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

>>>> 

>&

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

Early this year, Pornhub claimed to have close to 2 petabytes of video. Other 
sources suggested it was barely over 1 petabyte. Pornhub is the largest, but 
only one of several thousand sites serving this kind of video.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 10:06 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Steve writes:

> 

> < Hard-line "invisible hand of the market"-eers will insist that if it exists 
> in our economy, that it *must* be of interest/value/use to *many* (or at 
> least some). Invoking the idiom of "follow the money", I agree that we *can* 
> follow a chain of implied value that leads from the most marginal or absurd 
> to the common and mundane. >

> 

> I had a similar thought when I saw this  video. 
> One can’t simultaneously be sympathetic to this initiative and believe in the 
> invisible hand of the market. I haven’t found good recent documentation, but 
> I’ve heard that on the order of 30% of internet bandwidth has been used for 
> pornography.

> 

> Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

Nick,

No one made any claim about effectiveness. Just an observation that if you do 
year-by-year plot of birthrate in a given population you will see an annual 
increase leading to the onset of a war, an obvious decrease during the war, and 
a surge immediately after the war ends. The surge more than compensates for the 
drop during the war years, so effectiveness is out the window.

I think — haven't checked recently — that there was a gradual increase in birth 
rate between WWI and the onset of WWII, a 2-4 percent decrease during the war 
years, and a huge baby boom immediately after. Father Smith had similar 
statistical measures for dozens of other conflicts.

Population pressure / "birth control" are but one of a multitude of factors 
that lead to war. All kinds of arguments can be made about the "validity" of 
Father Smith's statistics — few pre-modern peoples kept comprehensive public 
health records, ...

davew


On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 11:21 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> David,

> 

> Basic fact of demography. Killing men is not a particularly effective means 
> of population control. 

> 

> You want war to serve in that capacity, you have to get women in the 
> military. 

> 

> Nick

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

> 

> 

> 


> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Steven A Smith
> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 8:00 PM
> *To:* friam@redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

> 

> Dave -

>> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
>> Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since 
>> prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

> Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and 
> *reduction*?

> The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much 
> warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the 
> men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, 
> inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. 
> Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic 
> heritage of Genghis Khan...

> One step more sophisticated than the rats?

> I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want 
> their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the 
> grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.

> - Steve

>>> Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” 
>>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
>>>  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst 
>>> sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the 
>>> Calhoun experiment on p 224.

>>> 

>>> Nick

>>> 

>>> Nicholas Thompson

>>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>>> Clark University

>>> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

>>> 

>>> 

>>> 

>>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels

>>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM

>>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 

>>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

>>> 

>>> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats 
>>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and 
>>> protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two 
>>> hundred. >

>>> 

>>> Maybe the rats were right?

>>> * *

>>> Marcus

>>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... 
>>>  . ...

>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

>>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam

>>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

>>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

>>> 

>> 


>> 

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>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
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>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 
> .-. .- -

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

Genghis did not "stay home" to procreate. He traveled with his armies, 
conquered other tribes / peoples; then married the daughters of the leaders of 
those he conquered. Marriage and children provided the political glue that held 
his empire together — including appointing his daughters as governors instead 
of sons.

My only assertion was that the Khan's genes spread via marriage - not wholesale 
rape.

Of course, the politically correct sensibility of today would characterize any 
marital relations under the umbrella of arranged / political marriage is by 
definition rape.

davew


On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 9:57 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> 

> On 5/2/20 8:39 PM, Prof David West wrote:
>> Genghis spread his genes via wives and concubines, not rapine. He also 
>> installed daughters and wives as regional governors instead of sons. 
>> Interesting historical figure.
> So Genghis stayed back home and procreated while he sent the boys out into 
> the field? And nobody got anyone pregnant while on the road? Or just Hooker's 
> Legionaires? 

> Hmmm curious.

> 

> 

>> 
>> davew
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>>> Dave -

>>>> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
>>>> Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — 
>>>> since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
>>> Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and 
>>> *reduction*?

>>> The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much 
>>> warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing 
>>> the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, 
>>> inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. 
>>> Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic 
>>> heritage of Genghis Khan...

>>> One step more sophisticated than the rats?

>>> I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want 
>>> their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the 
>>> grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.

>>> - Steve

>>>>> Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” 
>>>>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
>>>>>  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst 
>>>>> sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the 
>>>>> Calhoun experiment on p 224.

>>>>> 

>>>>> Nick

>>>>> 

>>>>> Nicholas Thompson

>>>>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>>>>> Clark University

>>>>> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

>>>>> 

>>>>> 

>>>>> 

>>>>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels
>>>>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
>>>>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>>>> 
>>>>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>>>>> 

>>>>> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats 
>>>>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and 
>>>>> protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above 
>>>>> two hundred. >

>>>>> 

>>>>> Maybe the rats were right?

>>>>> * *

>>>>> Marcus

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>>>>>  . ...
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>>>>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
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>>>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
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&g

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz]

Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this
five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not...
https://vimeo.com/411278238

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith  wrote:

> I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it,
> and anything I try will come out a mess.  So let me try for Less is More.
>
> I think part of this is habit and commitments.  Somehow the society has to
> sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much
> of what.  A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has
> enormous inertia.  Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of
> systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other
> systems in place to do as an alternative.
>
> Take food production.  Fine, what people need to eat is relatively
> inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to
> dollar-wealth.  But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are
> produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered
> to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible)
> turnaround times.  (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent
> commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive
> value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure
> where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis
> is needed.  For now I will just look at the simple one.
>
> We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops.  We
> don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to
> do that in a system that over-produces already.  So the production is
> there.  But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a
> grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why
> should he give us anything to eat?  You could say “Ah, he only needs enough
> to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because
> people need it.”  But he isn’t only one man.  He is a vastly debt-leveraged
> operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge
> loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns
> over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of
> Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both).  So he has no
> choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no
> money.  But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on
> 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed?  Some system
> has to work that out.
>
> During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization,
> the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s
> efforts would be liberated to do other good things.  But to the extent that
> those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following
> Steve S.), really all those other people are useless.
>
> One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed
> communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within
> much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I
> don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions.  So we are
> left with an unsolved problem of distribution.  Not least, just How do we
> coordinate it?  But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is
> perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to
> being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different
> things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).
>
> Take any other area.  Gas-powered transportation.  Well, maybe you don’t
> “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work
> close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc.  But where you
> are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically
> committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that
> whole “unnecessary” system.  So some part of the economic inertia comes
> just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which
> leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated
> services.
>
> Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V?  Coil some wire to
> make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire.  Sudden
> shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in
> addition to whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state
> of operation.
>
>
> If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one
> principle, and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and
> adequately stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second,
> are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a
> vast depth of smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Sarbajit Roy]

Its a variation on Parkinson's Law   (work expands to fill the time) ...
"Economies expand to keep their populations sedated"

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:17 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> Nick,
>
> I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would
> collapse.
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
>
>> Colleagues,
>>
>>
>>
>> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
>> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
>> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
>> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
>> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
>> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
>> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
>> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
>> do?
>>
>>
>>
>> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats
>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
>> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
>> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
>> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
>> of tens of thousands.
>>
>>
>>
>> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
>> understand?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> Frank Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 505 670-9918
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[thompnickson2]

David, 

 

Basic fact of demography.  Killing men is not a particularly effective means of 
population control.  

 

You want war to serve in that capacity, you have to get women in the military.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 8:00 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

Dave -

I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since 
prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and 
*reduction*?

The more literal usage works well too.  Controlling Births.  I think much 
warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the 
men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, inhabiting 
the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland.  Children 
alternatively would have been killed or enslaved.   Thus the genetic heritage 
of Genghis Khan...

One step more sophisticated than the rats?

I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want 
their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the 
grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.

- Steve

Well, in a sense that’s correct.  But their method of “birth control” 
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model.  Just imagine the worst 
sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel.  See the description of the Calhoun 
experiment on p 224.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> 

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

 

 

 

From: Friam  <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>  On 
Behalf Of Marcus Daniels

Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group  
<mailto:friam@redfish.com> 

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were 
put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected 
to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  >

 

Maybe the rats were right?

 

Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Marcus Daniels]

Steve writes:

< Hard-line "invisible hand of the market"-eers will insist that if it exists 
in our economy, that it *must* be of interest/value/use to *many* (or at least 
some).  Invoking the idiom of "follow the money", I agree that we *can* follow 
a chain of implied value that leads from the most marginal or absurd to the 
common and mundane. >

I had a similar thought when I saw this video.  
One can’t simultaneously be sympathetic to this initiative and believe in the 
invisible hand of the market.I haven’t found good recent documentation, but 
I’ve heard that on the order of 30% of internet bandwidth has been used for 
pornography.

Marcus
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Steven A Smith]

On 5/2/20 8:39 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Genghis spread his genes via wives and concubines, not rapine. He also
> installed daughters and wives as regional governors instead of sons.
> Interesting historical figure.

So Genghis stayed back home and procreated while he sent the boys out
into the field?  And nobody got anyone pregnant while on the road?   Or
just Hooker's Legionaires?   

Hmmm curious.



>
> davew
>
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>>
>> Dave -
>>
>>> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on
>>> the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind
>>> war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
>>
>> Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population*
>> and *reduction*?
>>
>> The more literal usage works well too.  Controlling Births.  I think
>> much warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the
>> victors killing the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the
>> women either in-place, inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them
>> back to their homeland.  Children alternatively would have been
>> killed or enslaved.   Thus the genetic heritage of Genghis Khan...
>>
>> One step more sophisticated than the rats?
>>
>> I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun
>> hoarders want their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least
>> for one round of the grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human
>> civilization.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>>> Well, in a sense that’s correct.  But their method of “birth
>>>> control”
>>>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
>>>> is not one that I am prepared to take as a model.  Just imagine the
>>>> worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel.  See the
>>>> description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.
>>>>
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>> Nick
>>>>
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>> Nicholas Thompson
>>>>
>>>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>>>
>>>> Clark University
>>>>
>>>> thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
>>>>
>>>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>> *From:* Friam 
>>>> <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels
>>>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
>>>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>>>>  <mailto:friam@redfish.com>
>>>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>>>>
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24
>>>> rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and
>>>> watered and protected to see how the population would develop. 
>>>> They never got above two hundred.  >
>>>>
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>> Maybe the rats were right?
>>>>
>>>> * *
>>>>
>>>> Marcus
>>>>
>>>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -..
>>>> .- ...  . ...
>>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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>>>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 
>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
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>>
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Steven A Smith]

On 5/2/20 8:36 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Major investors lose little — certainly as a percentage of wealth —
> because they have the super-high speed systems and insider status to
> ameliorate their loses. As always, it is the smaller investor that
> cannot trade in milliseconds, but in minutes and hours, that loses the
> most.

"ameliorate" hell... those who operate at those levels profit even
better from big drops... they can leverage *any* and *all* volatility,
especially that which is counter-intuitive to the average investor.  
Sure they may get up an hour or two earlier and stay up an hour or two
later to parlay around the globe (Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, etc.) but
they are rewarded *handsomely* for that extra vigilance.


>
> davew
>
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 4:12 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
>> Would the rich, with proportionally more in the stock market, be
>> disadvantaged by drops in stock prices? I suppose, on the other hand,
>> they would tend to have enough cash or equivalent to to take
>> advantage of the price drops to buy stocks at reduced prices.
>>
>> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 5:02 PM > <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, Dave,
>>
>>  
>>
>> Given that the super rich have the resiliency to respond to any
>> crisis, I have a hard time imagining  anything that would
>> disadvantage them EXCEPT taxing the living daylights out of
>> them.  We did pretty well on 90% marginal tax rates.   
>>
>>  
>>
>> I agree about the White Quarantine. 
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nicholas Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
>>
>>     https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> *From:* Friam > <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *Prof David West
>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 3:02 PM
>> *To:* friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>>
>>  
>>
>> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas
>> on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces
>> behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth
>> control.
>>
>>  
>>
>> davew
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 12:37 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com
>> <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Well, in a sense that’s correct.  But their method of “birth
>> control”
>> 
>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
>> is not one that I am prepared to take as a model.  Just
>> imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. 
>> See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>  
>>
>>     Nicholas Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> *From:* Friam > <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels
>>
>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
>>
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>> mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
>>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>>
>>  
>>
>> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in
>> which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in
>> Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the
>> population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  >
>>
>>  
>>
>> Maybe the rats were right?
>>
>> * *
>>
>> Marcus
>>
>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Steven A Smith]

Nick -

I contemplate this question regularly.   "What means 'the economy' ?" 
The way it is bandied about in the public media and among most circles I
listen to, it is this big hairball of exchange of goods and services
facilitated by "money", both in the form of currency and credit.    Yet
it is treated as if it is our psychic  (spiritual?) as well as physical
lifeblood.  

This abrupt interruption of *much* of that activity potentially exposes
a LOT about how much of a "false economy" we live within.  

Among the things that humans really need/want/value, I suspect the
"economy" we have grown creates goods and services that are not of any
particular use/interest/value to most (if any) of the human
population.   Hard-line "invisible hand of the market"-eers will insist
that if it exists in our economy, that it *must* be of
interest/value/use to *many* (or at least some).  Invoking the idiom of
"follow the money", I agree that we *can* follow a chain of implied
value that leads from the most marginal or absurd to the common and mundane.

I defer to Abraham Maslow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs for an
armature/prioritization of what human needs might *really* be.

During this shutdown, I suspect *many* are discovering (getting hints
of) what truly is important to them and if they are being
self-observant, what their greatest fears (and hopes?) might be.   The
trope "Guns, Germs, and Toilet Paper" erupted soon after the shutdown
and the abrupt/extreme shortage of disinfectants, personal paper
products, and ammunition/guns.

Returning to the core point:   For anyone without the currency/credit to
trade for the goods/services they DO need, this shutdown is already a
huge problem.   For those (like most if not all on this list) *with* a
decent reserve of currency/credit OR the kind of job or enterprise which
has it's own inertia or true value in this context (e.g. Inertial:
random professionals; True Value: Health Care Workers, Critical Retail
Workers, Internet Engineers...) there is not an immediate problem with
cash-flow, and may in fact never be a problem.  

Mangling Maslow:  we all need air to breathe, (fairly clean) water to
drink, enough shelter from the elements to keep avoid hyper (or hypo)
thermia,  and enough nutrients (and calories) to keep the metabolism and
growth/repair going.  

It seems that (so far) the basic infrastructure (power, water, natural
gas, coal, transportation, communications) is all staying solid... that
they are either robust enough to not be hurt by the disruptions or those
who maintain them have the motivation to keep them going in spite of the
challenges to doing so (much of the maintenance repair of such
infrastructure is inherently socially distanced?).   We may whine/worry
about our interwebs but even those seem to be holding up.   The power
grid is probably mildly stressed by shifting most of the use from
commercial to residential, and possibly is diminished (office buildings
under-heated/lit)?

I hear that the food depots around the country (first world?) are in a
multiple of demand of their normal level.  I don't know if the newly
impoverished are taking precedence over the previous or if they are just
joining their ranks, or if these services are coming close to matching
the demand.   I don't know if people are going hungry(ier) than they
were before... perhaps the flexibility built into our social fabric
(nuclear and extended families, friends, neighbors, social services) has
absorbed most of the shock.  Perhaps the congressional (in the US)
stimulus funding is trickling through to enough of the people to take
the ragged edge off for a week or a month.  Perhaps the PPP loans are
allowing *some* of the small (and not so small) businesses to keep
people on payroll.  Perhaps *some* of the unemployment funds in reserve
are getting to those who have formally lost their jobs (temporary or
long term).  

Meanwhile there is produce in the fields, milk in the cow (and storage),
and meat on the hoof that is not being processed and shipped to the
restaurants that are closed or not being processed because the people
who do that work are out sick, or afraid of coming to work where they
likely will get sick (lack of PPE, social distance, trust in co-worker's
health), or afraid of coming to work because they are NOT properly
documented through our foreign worker/immigration system or coming to
work sick (and therefore risking other's exposure) *because* they are
outside the legal system. This is a breakdown of our *heavily
industrialized* food supply system, which probably hasn't hit our
transportation/distribution systems (yet).   Wholesale warehouse workers
and OTR drivers are probably *fairly* able to avoid exposure/infection
in their normal work. 

It seems (deferring again to Maslow) that if we have the (collective)
*will* to keep our food-production/distribution systems going, the basic
infrastructure going, the MAIN (only?) thing we *really* 

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

Genghis spread his genes via wives and concubines, not rapine. He also 
installed daughters and wives as regional governors instead of sons. 
Interesting historical figure.

davew


On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> Dave -

>> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
>> Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since 
>> prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
> Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and 
> *reduction*?

> The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much 
> warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the 
> men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, 
> inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. 
> Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic 
> heritage of Genghis Khan...

> One step more sophisticated than the rats?

> I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want 
> their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the 
> grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.

> - Steve

>>> Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” 
>>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
>>>  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst 
>>> sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the 
>>> Calhoun experiment on p 224.

>>> 

>>> Nick

>>> 

>>> Nicholas Thompson

>>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>>> Clark University

>>> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

>>> 

>>> 

>>> 

>>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels
>>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
>>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>>> 

>>> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats 
>>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and 
>>> protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two 
>>> hundred. >

>>> 

>>> Maybe the rats were right?

>>> * *

>>> Marcus

>>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... 
>>>  . ...
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
>>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

Major investors lose little — certainly as a percentage of wealth — because 
they have the super-high speed systems and insider status to ameliorate their 
loses. As always, it is the smaller investor that cannot trade in milliseconds, 
but in minutes and hours, that loses the most.

davew


On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 4:12 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
> Would the rich, with proportionally more in the stock market, be 
> disadvantaged by drops in stock prices? I suppose, on the other hand, they 
> would tend to have enough cash or equivalent to to take advantage of the 
> price drops to buy stocks at reduced prices.
> 
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 5:02 PM  wrote:
>> Hi, Dave, 

>> __ __

>> Given that the super rich have the resiliency to respond to any crisis, I 
>> have a hard time imagining anything that would disadvantage them EXCEPT 
>> taxing the living daylights out of them. We did pretty well on 90% marginal 
>> tax rates. 

>> __ __

>> I agree about the White Quarantine. 

>> __ __

>> Nick 

>> __ __

>> __ __

>> __ __

>> Nicholas Thompson

>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>> Clark University

>> ThompNickSon2@gmail.com

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

>> 

>> __ __

>> __ __


>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Prof David West
>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 3:02 PM
>> *To:* friam@redfish.com
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

>> __ __

>> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
>> Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since 
>> prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

>> __ __

>> davew

>> __ __

>> __ __

>> On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 12:37 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:

>>> Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” 
>>> 
>>>  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst 
>>> sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the 
>>> Calhoun experiment on p 224.

>>> 

>>> Nick

>>> 

>>> Nicholas Thompson

>>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>>> Clark University

>>> ThompNickSon2@gmail.com

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

>>> __ __

>>> 

>>> 

>>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels

>>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM

>>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>> 

>>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

>>> 

>>> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats 
>>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and 
>>> protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two 
>>> hundred. >

>>> 

>>> Maybe the rats were right?

>>> * *

>>> Marcus

>>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... 
>>>  . ...

>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

>>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam

>>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

>>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

>>> __ __

>> __ __

>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... 
>>  . ...
>>  FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

Steve,

birth and control - remove the men from the breeding ground (home) to reduce 
the number of pregnancies. Father Smith presented the statistical and 
historical data for this argument.

A near cultural universal is the inverse relation of sex and violence. You want 
fierce warriors, deny them sex. Rape is just an extension of the violence - no 
sexual or procreative element.

Sex was used as a reward for soldiers, but not via raping the vanquished. Most 
have heard of the Japanese "comfort battalions"in WWII, but few are aware of 
how common that practice was with most armies throughout history.

General Hooker, US Civil War, was famous for his comfort battalion — "Hooker's 
Legions" — and that is the origin of the common term for a prostitute.

davew


On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> Dave -

>> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
>> Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since 
>> prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
> Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and 
> *reduction*?

> The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much 
> warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the 
> men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, 
> inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. 
> Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic 
> heritage of Genghis Khan...

> One step more sophisticated than the rats?

> I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want 
> their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the 
> grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.

> - Steve

>>> Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” 
>>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
>>>  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst 
>>> sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the 
>>> Calhoun experiment on p 224.

>>> 

>>> Nick

>>> 

>>> Nicholas Thompson

>>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>>> Clark University

>>> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

>>> 

>>> 

>>> 

>>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels
>>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
>>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>>> 

>>> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats 
>>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and 
>>> protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two 
>>> hundred. >

>>> 

>>> Maybe the rats were right?

>>> * *

>>> Marcus

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>>> 
>> 
>> 
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>> 
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Steven A Smith]

Dave -

> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the
> Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war —
> since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and
*reduction*?

The more literal usage works well too.  Controlling Births.  I think
much warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors
killing the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either
in-place, inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their
homeland.  Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved.  
Thus the genetic heritage of Genghis Khan...

One step more sophisticated than the rats?

I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders
want their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round
of the grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.

- Steve

>> Well, in a sense that’s correct.  But their method of “birth control”
>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
>> is not one that I am prepared to take as a model.  Just imagine the
>> worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel.  See the description
>> of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nicholas Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels
>> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>> 
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>>
>>  
>>
>> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24
>> rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and
>> watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They
>> never got above two hundred.  >
>>
>>  
>>
>> Maybe the rats were right?
>>
>> * *
>>
>> Marcus
>>
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>>
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Marcus Daniels]

Krugman provides an analysis..

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/economy-stock-market-coronavirus.html

From: Friam  on behalf of Gary Schiltz 

Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Date: Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 3:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

Would the rich, with proportionally more in the stock market, be disadvantaged 
by drops in stock prices? I suppose, on the other hand, they would tend to have 
enough cash or equivalent to to take advantage of the price drops to buy stocks 
at reduced prices.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 5:02 PM 
mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi, Dave,

Given that the super rich have the resiliency to respond to any crisis, I have 
a hard time imagining  anything that would disadvantage them EXCEPT taxing the 
living daylights out of them.  We did pretty well on 90% marginal tax rates.

I agree about the White Quarantine.

Nick



Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
thompnicks...@gmail.com<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/


From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> On 
Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 3:02 PM
To: friam@redfish.com<mailto:friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since 
prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

davew


On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 12:37 PM, 
thompnicks...@gmail.com<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, in a sense that’s correct.  But their method of “birth 
control”<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
 is not one that I am prepared to take as a model.  Just imagine the worst sort 
of dystopian post apocalyptic novel.  See the description of the Calhoun 
experiment on p 224.



Nick



Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

thompnicks...@gmail.com<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>

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






From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> On 
Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question



< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were 
put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected 
to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  >



Maybe the rats were right?



Marcus
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz]

Would the rich, with proportionally more in the stock market, be
disadvantaged by drops in stock prices? I suppose, on the other hand, they
would tend to have enough cash or equivalent to to take advantage of the
price drops to buy stocks at reduced prices.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 5:02 PM  wrote:

> Hi, Dave,
>
>
>
> Given that the super rich have the resiliency to respond to any crisis, I
> have a hard time imagining  anything that would disadvantage them EXCEPT
> taxing the living daylights out of them.  We did pretty well on 90%
> marginal tax rates.
>
>
>
> I agree about the White Quarantine.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Prof David West
> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 3:02 PM
> *To:* friam@redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>
>
>
> I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the
> Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war —
> since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
>
>
>
> davew
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 12:37 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> Well, in a sense that’s correct.  But their method of “birth control”
> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
> is not one that I am prepared to take as a model.  Just imagine the worst
> sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel.  See the description of the
> Calhoun experiment on p 224.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels
>
> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
>
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>
>
>
> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats
> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
> two hundred.  >
>
>
>
> Maybe the rats were right?
>
>
>
> Marcus
>
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>
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>
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>
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>
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>
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>
>
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[thompnickson2]

Hi, Dave, 

 

Given that the super rich have the resiliency to respond to any crisis, I have 
a hard time imagining  anything that would disadvantage them EXCEPT taxing the 
living daylights out of them.  We did pretty well on 90% marginal tax rates.   

 

I agree about the White Quarantine.  

 

Nick 

 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 3:02 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since 
prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

 

davew

 

 

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 12:37 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com 
<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>  wrote:

Well, in a sense that’s correct.  But their method of “birth control” 
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model.  Just imagine the worst 
sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel.  See the description of the Calhoun 
experiment on p 224.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

 

From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > On 
Behalf Of Marcus Daniels

Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> >

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were 
put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected 
to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  >

 

Maybe the rats were right?

 

Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the 
Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since 
prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

davew


On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 12:37 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” 
> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
>  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst 
> sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun 
> experiment on p 224.

> 

> Nick

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

> 

> 

> 


> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels
> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

> 

> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were 
> put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and 
> protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two 
> hundred. >

> 

> Maybe the rats were right?

> * *

> Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Prof David West]

Nick,

The dragon asks:

in whose interest was the lock down? 32 Billionaires — that I know of from 
press reports — have increased their net wealth by as much as 10-20%. Large 
corporations will have their profits protected, so much so that one of the 
"rules" of the bailout money is that when corporate profits for the year are 
higher than last year, no bonuses may be paid from the bailout money. But money 
is fungible, so expect the bonuses to be paid - from other sources of funding 
of course.

And who gets the "health benefit" from the lock down? The well-to-do — 
including, probably, a large majority of FRIAM members — not the blue collar 
meat packers or the pink collar grocery clerks.

asketh Puff



On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 12:30 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Marcus, Gary,

> 

> Thanks for responding. I stipulate that mine is the sort of question that 
> could only be asked by a person too privileged to be taken seriously. But 
> such people should *occasionally* be heard, so I was asking to heard. And you 
> heard me. Thanks.

> 

> Let’s put it another way. What we call the economy is kind of [like] an 
> addiction to speed. Calling it an addiction highlights the fact that 
> withdrawal is a hideous experience that can kill you. 

> 

> Allow me a Marxist sort of thought. In whose *interest* is it to increase the 
> velocity of transactions in the marketplace? It is in the interest of the 
> corporations and governments that skim off those transactions. If we COULD 
> slow down the rate of transactions without killing ourselves, who would 
> suffer? Large organizations that tax those transactions. (I think of 
> corporate profit as a tax.) That is why the government just sent me 2400 
> dollars that I absolutely don’t need. The letter from Donald say, “Go thou 
> Nick into the market place and rush about so I may tax thee.”

> 

> This Marxist thought is similar to another. Why in the sixties did THEY allow 
> feminism to escape from the bottle since the 19th century. Because THEY 
> realized that if THEY could turn intrafamily and intra community transactions 
> into market place transactions then the same work (raising families) could be 
> taxed two or three times as often. 

> 

> THEY are bastards. Why are we helping THEM do their work. Or are WE THEY?

> 

> Nick

> 

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

> 

> 

> 


> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Gary Schiltz
> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 11:38 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

> 

> Hey Nick, did you mean your question to apply to mostly the USA? Europe? 
> Asia? Africa? South America? Although I keep up a little bit with what's 
> going on in the USA and a bit more about Europe, lately my familiarity is 
> more with Ecuador and to a lesser extent the rest of South America. Down 
> here, we are far from being in a sustainable mode. I can drive one day a 
> week. Supermarkets are open only until 1:00 pm, nationwide curfews from 2:00 
> pm until 5:30 am. Open questions abound: will farmers plant anything during 
> the lockdown? when will the country allow imports again?

> 

> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 11:34 AM  wrote:

>> Colleagues,

>> 

>> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and 
>> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is 
>> this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in 
>> human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to 
>> bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? 
>> It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our 
>> present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people 
>> frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? 

>> 

>> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were 
>> put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and 
>> protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two 
>> hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, 
>> a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens 
>> of thousands. 

>> 

>> Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not 
>> understand?

>> 

>> Nick

>> 

>> Nicholas Thompson

>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

>> Clark University

>> thompnicks...@gmail.com

>&g

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[thompnickson2]

“pent up energy of academic labs”

 

What a thought!

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 1:32 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

Example of the government just getting in the way.

 

https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/msu-researchers-macgyver-new-covid-19-test-but-wait-for-green-light,14290

 

From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > on 
behalf of Jochen Fromm mailto:j...@cas-group.net> >
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> >
Date: Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 12:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

The economy is collapsing right now. It has positive side effects like clean 
air in L.A. and Beijing, but right now it is collapsing.

 

-J.

 

 

 

 Original message 

From: Frank Wimberly mailto:wimber...@gmail.com> > 

Date: 5/2/20 18:47 (GMT+01:00) 

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> > 

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question 

 

Nick,

 

I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would 
collapse.

 

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good 
reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this 
economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human 
activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars 
and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It 
seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present 
status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically 
rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put 
in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to 
see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  
Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a 
competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of 
thousands.  

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not 
understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> 

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

 

 

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-- 

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Marcus Daniels]

Example of the government just getting in the way.

https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/msu-researchers-macgyver-new-covid-19-test-but-wait-for-green-light,14290

From: Friam  on behalf of Jochen Fromm 

Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Date: Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 12:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

The economy is collapsing right now. It has positive side effects like clean 
air in L.A. and Beijing, but right now it is collapsing.

-J.



 Original message 
From: Frank Wimberly 
Date: 5/2/20 18:47 (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

Nick,

I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would 
collapse.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM 
mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good 
reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this 
economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human 
activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars 
and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It 
seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present 
status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically 
rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put 
in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to 
see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  
Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a 
competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of 
thousands.

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not 
understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
thompnicks...@gmail.com<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/


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--
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Jochen Fromm]

The economy is collapsing right now. It has positive side effects like clean 
air in L.A. and Beijing, but right now it is collapsing.-J.
 Original message From: Frank Wimberly  
Date: 5/2/20  18:47  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity 
Coffee Group  Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question 
Nick,I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would 
collapse.On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  
wrote:Colleagues,  I have asked this question before and nobody has responded 
(for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  
What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the 
difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  
We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are 
reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and 
our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people 
frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?   You 
recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a 
quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see 
how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant 
mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab 
breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.   
Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not 
understand?  Nick  Nicholas ThompsonEmeritus Professor of Ethology and 
PsychologyClark 
UniversityThompNickSon2@gmail.comhttps://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/   .-. 
.- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...  . ...
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-- Frank Wimberly140 Calle Ojo FelizSanta Fe, NM 87505505 670-9918
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz]

The human civilization that has developed over the last handful of
millennia is a pretty thin veneer over the basic drives that control the
rats' behavior. Like most of us, I've grown up dependent on that thin
veneer, and would sorely miss it :-)  I'm not very optimistic that it will
survive, but I rather hope it does.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 1:38 PM  wrote:

> Well, in a sense that’s correct.  But their method of “birth control”
> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
> is not one that I am prepared to take as a model.  Just imagine the worst
> sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel.  See the description of the
> Calhoun experiment on p 224.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Marcus Daniels
> *Sent:* Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question
>
>
>
> < You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats
> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
> two hundred.  >
>
>
>
> Maybe the rats were right?
>
>
>
> Marcus
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>
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[thompnickson2]

Well, in a sense that’s correct.  But their method of “birth control” 
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development>
  is not one that I am prepared to take as a model.  Just imagine the worst 
sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel.  See the description of the Calhoun 
experiment on p 224. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were 
put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected 
to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  >

 

Maybe the rats were right?

 

Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[thompnickson2]

Marcus, Gary, 

 

Thanks for responding.  I stipulate that mine is the sort of question that 
could only be asked by a person too privileged to be taken seriously.   But 
such people should occasionally be heard, so I was asking to heard.  And you 
heard me.  Thanks. 

 

Let’s put it another way.  What we call the economy is kind of [like] an 
addiction to speed.  Calling it an addiction highlights the fact that 
withdrawal is a hideous experience that can kill you.  

 

Allow me a Marxist sort of thought.  In whose interest is it to increase the 
velocity of transactions in the marketplace?  It is in the interest of the 
corporations and governments that skim off those transactions.  If we COULD 
slow down the rate of transactions without killing ourselves, who would suffer? 
 Large organizations that tax those transactions. (I think of corporate profit 
as a tax.)  That is why the government just sent me 2400 dollars that I 
absolutely don’t need.  The letter from Donald say, “Go thou Nick into the 
market place and rush about so I may tax thee.” 

 

This Marxist thought is similar to another.  Why in the sixties did THEY allow 
feminism to escape from the bottle since the 19th century.  Because THEY 
realized that if THEY could turn intrafamily and intra community transactions 
into market place transactions then the same work (raising families) could be 
taxed two or three times as often.  

 

THEY are bastards.  Why are we helping THEM do their work.  Or are WE THEY?

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 11:38 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

Hey Nick, did you mean your question to apply to mostly the USA? Europe? Asia? 
Africa? South America? Although I keep up a little bit with what's going on in 
the USA and a bit more about Europe, lately my familiarity is more with Ecuador 
and to a lesser extent the rest of South America. Down here, we are far from 
being in a sustainable mode. I can drive one day a week. Supermarkets are open 
only until 1:00 pm, nationwide curfews from 2:00  pm until 5:30 am. Open 
questions abound: will farmers plant anything during the lockdown? when will 
the country allow imports again?

 

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 11:34 AM mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good 
reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this 
economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human 
activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars 
and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It 
seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present 
status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically 
rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put 
in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to 
see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  
Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a 
competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of 
thousands.  

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not 
understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> 

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

 

 

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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Marcus Daniels]

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were 
put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected 
to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[thompnickson2]

Ah, Russ, 

 

It’s great to hear from you, again.  One of the best things I ever wrote came 
about because of a year of arguing with you!

 

The lesson I take is that the designs for life maintenance have nothing to do 
with the designs for happiness.  We are not designed to be happy;  we are 
designed to eke out an existence on a semi-arid plain within a small group 
surrounded by hostile groups.  I.e, we are designed to be miserable.  So if we 
are to be happy,  amidst plenty, we have to make choices – collective choices. 

 

For the details of the rat experiment, look at page 224 in 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238356686_A_Utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development
 

Please let me know if it is unreadable. 

 

Oh, just to head off some flames from that famous quasi=libertarian dragon, 
Dave (Hi, Dave!), I make no pretense to knowing HOW to make collective choices. 
 I just know that we will make them, one way or another.  Again I commend to 
you all Jim Rutt’s recent podcast on consensus and policy. 

 

Thanks again, Russ, for all your help with my writing. 

 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

 

From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > On 
Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 11:17 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

Nick, What lessons do you take away from the rat experiment? Certainly, 
breeders can use space differently from natural populations. But that isn't 
surprising. If the natural density of a rat population is 200/quarter acre, 
what do you make of that, and why do you think it's important?

 

P.S. I'm assuming that we don't have to argue too much about what "natural 
density" means. Of course, it will differ depending on circumstances such as 
weather, food availability, etc. But I assume that's not your point.

 

-- Russ Abbott   
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com

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

 

 

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 11:17 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

 

Nick, What lessons do you take away from the rat experiment? Certainly, 
breeders can use space differently from natural populations. But that isn't 
surprising. If the natural density of a rat population is 200/quarter acre, 
what do you make of that, and why do you think it's important?

 

P.S. I'm assuming that we don't have to argue too much about what "natural 
density" means. Of course, it will differ depending on circumstances such as 
weather, food availability, etc. But I assume that's not your point.

 

-- Russ Abbott   
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles

 

 

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 9:47 AM Frank Wimberly mailto:wimber...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick,

 

I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would 
collapse.

 

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good 
reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this 
economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human 
activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars 
and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It 
seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present 
status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically 
rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put 
in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to 
see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  
Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a 
competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of 
thousands.  

 

Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not 
understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> 

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

 

 

.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...  
. ...
FRIA

Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz]

I hope it didn't sound like I was yelling at you, Nick :-)  Given the state
of the economy here in northern South America, your question a little too
USA-centric. And my response was obviously from a different perspective. I
actually don't know what the state of the US economy is right now. For
example, are a large percentage of the populace who have to be physically
at their job site back to work now? I'm not talking about paper pushers
(knowledge workers) who can work remotely. Are farmers in the field
planting or harvesting crops? Are there enough people tending to the power
grid? the water systems? Basic stuff. That's the economy that I'm concerned
with.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 11:34 AM  wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
>
>
> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
> do?
>
>
>
> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were
> put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
> of tens of thousands.
>
>
>
> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
> understand?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
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> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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>
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz]

Hey Nick, did you mean your question to apply to mostly the USA? Europe?
Asia? Africa? South America? Although I keep up a little bit with what's
going on in the USA and a bit more about Europe, lately my familiarity is
more with Ecuador and to a lesser extent the rest of South America. Down
here, we are far from being in a sustainable mode. I can drive one day a
week. Supermarkets are open only until 1:00 pm, nationwide curfews from
2:00  pm until 5:30 am. Open questions abound: will farmers plant anything
during the lockdown? when will the country allow imports again?

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 11:34 AM  wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
>
>
> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
> do?
>
>
>
> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were
> put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
> of tens of thousands.
>
>
>
> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
> understand?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>  . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
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. ...
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Marcus Daniels]

Nick writes:

< It seems to me that the difference between a “healthy” economy and our 
present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people 
frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? >

It is true I don’t need a haircut.   But there’s gal who cuts my hair and her 
husband.   She has no business.   Her husband teaches for one of those private 
tutoring companies.   Their household, I expect, has no incoming income except 
for the small amount of small business loans they might be able to get, 
unemployment, and federal relief.   That’s not sustainable even if they don’t 
pay rent for a few months.

Marcus


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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Russ Abbott]

Nick, What lessons do you take away from the rat experiment? Certainly,
breeders can use space differently from natural populations. But that isn't
surprising. If the natural density of a rat population is 200/quarter acre,
what do you make of that, and why do you think it's important?

P.S. I'm assuming that we don't have to argue too much about what "natural
density" means. Of course, it will differ depending on circumstances such
as weather, food availability, etc. But I assume that's not your point.

-- Russ Abbott
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles


On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 9:47 AM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> Nick,
>
> I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would
> collapse.
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:
>
>> Colleagues,
>>
>>
>>
>> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
>> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
>> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
>> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
>> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
>> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
>> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
>> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
>> do?
>>
>>
>>
>> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats
>> were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
>> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
>> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
>> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
>> of tens of thousands.
>>
>>
>>
>> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
>> understand?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>>  . ...
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>
>
>
> --
> Frank Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 505 670-9918
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
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>
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Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Frank Wimberly]

Nick,

I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would
collapse.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM  wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
>
>
> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
> do?
>
>
>
> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were
> put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
> of tens of thousands.
>
>
>
> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
> understand?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>  . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>


-- 
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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[FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[thompnickson2]

Colleagues, 

 

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is
this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a "healty" economy and
our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people
frantically rushing about doing things they don't really need to do?  

 

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were
put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two
hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of
tens of thousands.  

 

Don't yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
understand? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

thompnicks...@gmail.com  

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

 

 

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