Re: Some thoughts on one of the threads

[Ray E. Harrell]

Thomas;

First, leisure is overated.   Second, freedom without significance and
discipline is slavery.  Third, jobs are new but work is from the beginning of
time and Fourth, poverty and hunger are overated as a stimulus for creativity or
anything else except rage and murder. I've seen them all.

REH

Thomas Lunde wrote:

(snip)

> It was the last sentence that resonated within me.  I have long felt that we
> deny ourselves one of our birthrights - indolence and unemployment.  I enjoy
> immensely - doing little or nothing and I enjoy immensely - the pleasure of
> following my impulses.  Work and employment destroy those natural human
> attributes and make them into leisure activities that can only be indulged
> in after worshipping at the alter of employment.  Biologically, I think we
> are not workers, but livers of life.  I for one, welcome a future of leisure
> and indolence.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Thomas Lunde

Fw: Low Income Jobs

[Ed Weick]

Back to the future?

Ed Weick



>"The United States is the richest country on the planet yet is has the
>greatest income disparity . . . . Sixty percent of all U.S. jobs created
>since 1979 pay less than $7,000 a year."
>  --Fian Fact Sheet, "Welfare by Corporations is Corporate Welfare"
>
>I cannot absolutely vouch for these figures.  They were passed on to me by
>Hank Roth on his PNEWS list and I don't know anything about the source.
>
>However, many of my students are working at low income jobs while they work
>their way gradually through college -- generally now obliged to study
>part-time by our escalating CUNY tuition costs -- either during any given
>semester or on a semester on, semester off pattern -- or both.
>
>Actually my students are not at the bottom rank  They are likely to be
>earning in the $20 - 30,000 range.  But life is not easy there with
>dependents to support and basic benefits missing or reduced.  One of my
>students with a child reported one week that while she was contributing in
>part for her medical insurance, it did not cover well child care which
>figured out to about $6,000 a year.  The next week she reported that she
had
>been notified that her child would no be any longer covered at all!  Our
>CUNY adjuncts must pay upwards to an additional $300.00 per month for
family
>coverage.
>
>All too typically my students earning in this bracket have NO benefits --
>either medical or pension -- and yet they are earning too much to qualify
for
>Medicaid.  There is a new program for covering children and based on
>income spread around in various guises in the states, but when I happened
>upon it is was still a deep dark secret.
>
>Typical job situations: two students in one class were managers of their
>local MacDonald's -- managers are apparently paid from $20,000 to
$30,000+ --
>but no benefits, medical or retirement.  Manifestly our fast food workers
>need to be unionized.  They are NOT, contrary to the reports of those who

>would have them subject to wages even below the minimum, all high school
>students earning extra bucks for designer jeans.  They are increasingly
>people who are being dumped from welfare, are desperate to keep whatever
>homes for themselves and children (2/3 of those on welfare are children and
>many of these supported by single parents) they can and finding it now even
>more difficult to feed their kids as the soup kitchens are increasingly
>running short of supplies (See "As Need for Food Grows, Donations Steadily
>Drop," NY Times, 2/27/99).
>
>Michael Harrington turned around American patterns of malnutrition and
>starvation in the 1960s with his little book, The Other America, which
>alerted us to the terrible facts of hunger in the midst of American
affluence.
>
>It looks as though we may be racing back to those bad old days again.
>
>Ed Kent  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>

"Greening the tax man"

[Steve Kurtz]

Simplistic, has problems with growth.., but for editors of a paper in a North
Amer. national capital, I'm impressed.


  "Greening the tax man"

Editorial in "The Ottawa Citizen" Friday, February 19th, 1999. 

If there's one thing everyone should know about economics it is that
incentives matter. The more you reward an activity the more people will do
it, and the more you punish it, the less they will. 

It seems simple. Yet in all the analysis of the federal budget, few are
asking the basic questions: Why do we tax things we want more of, like
income, employment, and purchases, but not things we want less of, like the
emission of air and water pollution?

For years, environmentalists have been trying to get government to notice
this bizarre state of affairs, with catchy slogans like "tax bads, not
goods." They've had mild success in Europe and none in North America. That's
unfortunate because a major shift of the tax burden away from good economic
activity to environmentally harmful practices would spark a green revolution
good for the environment and the economy. 

Under the current tax regime, governments net the billions of dollars they
need almost exclusively by taking a cut of economic activity (personal
income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes, and so on) for no better reason
than that governments needed the money and these sources are the easiest to
collect from. 

But these taxes lessen the desire to see one's income rise since, at a
certain point, the effort required isn't worth the fractional increase left
over after the tax bite. They give people reasons to not purchase  the goods
and services that keep the economy humming. They give companies reason not
to hire more employees. 

At the same time, our taxes do nothing to discourage all sorts of
environmentally destructive activities. Imagine a generic factory belching
pollutants up a smokestack. As long as the factory stay within the limits
set by regulations, it's free to spew out filth. That filth inflicts costs
on others ("externalities") such as poisoned waterways or health care costs
from respiratory problems. But the government lets the plant inflict these
costs on others while benefitting from the production that causes them. If
the plant makes $1,000 worth of its product at a cost of $2,000 in
environmental damage, it nets $1,000 meaning the pollution's victims are
subsidizing the polluter. Even more perversely, a conscientious factory
owner who wanted to buy equipment to cut the pollution couldn't, since the
cost would put him at an economic disadvantage to his competitors. It's a
bizarre, unfair situation. British economist Arthur Cecil Piqou recognized
this inequality in the 1920's  and advocated  environmental taxes that would
make polluters pay the real costs of their activities. He's as right today
as 80 years ago. 

But green taxes do more than just punish polluters. They create a new
incentive - this time a positive one. The factory owner who figures out how
to emit  less pollution cuts his tax bill. If he figures out how to
eliminate the pollution entirely, he avoids the tax entirely and puts
himself ahead of his competitors. The green thing to do also becomes the
profitable one. 

When the dynamism of the free market is put in the service of environmental
innovation, we can be sure to achieve greening that no regulatory scheme
could manage. That's not just theory, either. A German tax on the creation
of toxic waste resulted in a 15 percent drop in three years. A Dutch tax on
the  emissions of heavy metals like lead, mercury, and cadmium produced a 90
percent cut in emissions within two decades. When the ill-effects of leaded
gasoline  became clear, Malaysia simply taxed it, creating  an immediate,
nation-wide shift to unleaded gas. 

Ah, but politics intrudes. No matter how justified green taxes may be, if
they're presented as tax increases, they're bound to encounter the sort of
stiff opposition that sank the Chretien government's proposed carbon tax.
The solution is tax swapping: A dollar in new green taxes should be matched
by a dollar cut from, say, income taxes. That's good economics as well as
good politics. 

Scandinavian countries in particular have accepted these lessons. Sweden,
Denmark, and Holland have each shifted some of their income and payroll
taxes onto carbon emissions, electricity sales, waste incineration and
pesticide use. In 1996, the United Kingdom took a slice off payroll taxes
and put it on landfilling. In 1995, Spain also cut payroll taxes but raised
gas taxes. 

Whether Canada would wish to make these particular swaps or others depends
on the particulars of each case. But the broad theory of a green tax shift
is sound and should be explored by Canadians parties and governments. Taxes
like death, may be inevitable, but perverse incentives are not.

Re: Some thoughts on one of the threads

[Bob McDaniel]

Brian McAndrews wrote:

> As I've mentioned before on this list, all of Ivan Illich's books (eg.
> Deschooling Society, Medical Nemesis, Shadow Work, Tools for Conviviality,
> ..)
> would enlighten our discussions. Pertinent to this thread I'd suggest
> Illich's 'The Right to Useful Unemployment and its Professional Enemies'.
>

Quite. Read most of 'em. A couple of relevant URLs are:

The Abolition of Work 
Idle Theory


On the other hand, there's a Biblical view:

Some thoughts on idleness: 

Bob


--
___
http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/

Re: competition/contradiction

[Ed Weick]

>What exists now with huge TNC dominance of global mkts isn't increasing
>competition; it's decreasing it. Takeovers, mergers, secret price fixing,
and
>cases like sterile gentech seeds, are IMO classically monopolistic
>(anti-competitive). The smaller, local/regional businesses usually can't
compete
>on price (quality/safety is not always easily judged by consumers), & if
any
>small guys do compete pretty well, the big guys try to buy them ASAP. I've
seen
>my mouthwash - Viadent(vegetable base) get bought by Colgate Palmolive.
Next
>thing they did was come out with a totally different product, same name but
>called "better tasting formula". It was a totally different formula with no
>'sanguinaria'(sp.?). They still sell the original one, much better IMO, but
can
>stop anytime they choose.
>
>Competition is more players/products, not fewer. Myth is that increased
>competition is destroying product quality. Globalisation & monopolisation
look
>like the culprits to me.


I think this is valid.  A problem is that individual countries have
anti-combines or anti-monopoly legislation, but there are no international
counterparts.  The MAI was imperfect in many respects, but it at least began
the process of setting some rules around international corporate and
government behaviour.  However, the MAI is now dead, at least for the time
being.

Ed Weick

Re: Some thoughts on one of the threads

[Ed Weick]

>> Moravec argues that the concept of work was unknown before agriculture
and
>> the industrial revolution and that we'll get rid of it permanently within
a
>> few decades, when smart machines free us not only from household chores,
but
>> also from exhausting tasks such as writing computer software or managing
>> corporations.  Contrary to popular fears, we'll celebrate our redundancy
>> because, as hunter-gatherers, indolence and unemployment are part of our
>> evolutionary heritage.
>>
>> Thomas:
>>
>> It was the last sentence that resonated within me.  I have long felt that
we
>> deny ourselves one of our birthrights - indolence and unemployment.  I
enjoy
>> immensely - doing little or nothing and I enjoy immensely - the pleasure
of
>> following my impulses.  Work and employment destroy those natural human
>> attributes and make them into leisure activities that can only be
indulged
>> in after worshipping at the alter of employment.  Biologically, I think
we
>> are not workers, but livers of life.  I for one, welcome a future of
leisure
>> and indolence.


I believe the picture here of hunters and gatherers is false.  Perhaps a
few, here and there, could live a life of indolence and ease, plucking
bananas off the nearest tree at will, etc., but most were very busy year
round.  They would follow what anthropologists used to call "the calandar of
the seasons" (perhaps they still do, but I haven't talked with one
recently).  The most important objective was to use the bountiful seasons,
summer and fall, to put away as much food as possible for the lean seasons.
I have been to native fish camps in the NWT and Yukon at which fish were
being caught, dried and smoked.  Everyone was busy, everyone worked.  If it
was not catching and preserving fish, it was berry picking for the women and
children and hunting for the men.  Everything that was not consumed on the
spot was preserved in one way or another.

Much has changed in the NWT and Yukon since aboriginal times.  Then, small
family groups moved around on the land permanently pursuing one activity
here, another there.  In a severe climate, such as that of northern Canada,
the primary objective was, I repeat, to put away enough food to survive the
cold winter.  When the fur trade came along, winter became the trapping
season.  Families would augment the "income in kind" they had preserved with
goods obtained at the trading post.  But the main point is that there was
very little time for indolence.  People had fun at fish camps, but having
fun was part of doing work.

If you go into a northern aboriginal community now, you will see plenty of
indolence.  I've been to one in northern Saskatchewan in which the indolence
was total.  So was alcoholism, drugs, and wife and child abuse.  Why?
Because the people were no longer out on the land hunting and gathering and
there was absolutely nothing to do in town except collect welfare.  The
hunting-gathering-trapping economy had disappeared decades ago.  Then, for a
time, people were employed in a commercial fishery.  That collapsed and now
there is nothing.

There is another thought in this, though it's a little speculative.  This is
that once one understands how hard people had to work as hunters and
gatherers, and how uncertain it was that they could put away enough food for
the lean season, it is easier to understand why people developed
agriculture.  While agricultural work is not easy, it provides a much
greater certainty that enough food will be produced to tide people over
between crops.  There was considerable control over this.  Sure, crops
failed, but people learned from this and developed sophisticated farming
methods, such as irrigation.  Moreover, people could produce, preserve, and
consume their food in a single place; they didn't have to move it around
with them as hunters and gatherers did, wondering if they had enough to get
them to the next food source.  For hunters and gatherers certainty was never
possible.  The methods that could be used to harvest and preserve food were
quite limited, and, despite the development of shamanism to a high art,
there was virtually no human control over the resource base.

Ed Weick

Re: Some thoughts on one of the threads

[Brian McAndrews]

As I've mentioned before on this list, all of Ivan Illich's books (eg.
Deschooling Society, Medical Nemesis, Shadow Work, Tools for Conviviality,
..)
would enlighten our discussions. Pertinent to this thread I'd suggest
Illich's 'The Right to Useful Unemployment and its Professional Enemies'.

**
*  Brian McAndrews, Practicum Coordinator*
*  Faculty of Education, Queen's University  *
*  Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 *
*  FAX:(613) 533-6307  Phone (613) 533-6000x74937*
*  e-mail:   [EMAIL PROTECTED]*
*  "The limits of our language means the limits  *
*   of our world"Wittgenstein*
**
**
**

Replies to the Macro and Micro aspects of the Global Model

[WesBurt]

To:  Frequent posters, lurkers, and innocents on several mail lists 

Hi Folks,

Like the flapping of a butterfly's wings (as in CHAOS, Making A New Science,
1987, by James Gleik), every post to list futurework probably affects and
influences each following post such that there is a slow but certain growth
and deepening of consensus among the list members regarding The Optimum Policy
(TOP) for creating a new social order.  Now I submit to you that this "new
social order" cannot really be new because the nature of the primary elements
in the social order; the environment, the capital improvements on (or injury
to) the environment, and the people have not changed much in the last 10,000
years.  

OK, so the technology has advanced much more than our knowledge of human
nature.  But this advance of science over politics has been accomplished over
just the last 200 years and the gap between the two is widening faster than
the gap between the incomes of the comfortable class and the incomes of the
financially impaired class.  The former of the two classes sometimes appear to
believe that the latter are of a different species than themselves, if we
judge by the legislation enacted in the U.S. during the 20th century. 

I thank Paul Dumais, John Courtneidge, and John Turmel for their thoughtful
comments on my last post and for reiterating their position on the best way to
TOP.  Paul Dumais was not sure that he had all of the answers and left the
door open for further dialog.  John Courtneidge is a true believer in Tony
Blair's aim of:  " . .  . a strong, united society which gives each citizen
the chance to develop their potential to the full . ." by way of a co-
operative socialist approach to the new social order.  But we can't sell that
approach in the States.  And John Turmel states his position in a recent post:

>>  JCT: My whole point is that the development of LETS (Local Employment
Trading Systems) is way past the point of no return. Governments could squelch
any incipient Technocracy Energy 
Certificate systems, they could squelch any Social Credit 
systems but it's too late to squelch the many thousands of 
government-endorsed LETSystems around the world. <<
~~

I cannot share John's confidence in the idea that "government-endorsed
LETSystems around the world" have advanced beyond the point of no-return, or
beyond the point of no-repeal by the same government which endorsed them.
Recall, for example, the history of children's and family allowances which
were established during the 1940s.  That "family wage" structure was adopted
by every advanced industrial nation that fought in World War II, except the
United Kingdom and the United States, according to the works of such authors
as Stuart Chase, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robert Theobald, and John LaCerda.
In his 1946 book, THE CONQUEROR COMES TO TEA, Japan under MacArthur, LaCerda
confirms that Japan also adopted the same family wage structure that was
established in Western Europe, over the objections of MacArthur's sixteen-man
labor advisory board headed by Paul Stanchfield, formerly with the U.S. Office
of War Mobilization and Reconversion (see page 133).  

Here we are, 50 years later, and that whole three decades of world history,
1946 to 1970, during which Japan and western Europe overtook the U.S.A., as
measured by GNP/capita, has been wiped out of the public mind.  In my five
years on the internet, I have yet to find a citizen of the Commonwealth
Nations who will disclose any knowledge of that three decades, and how the
family allowances were swamped and rendered ineffective, as the U.S. money
supply expanded to cause the worldwide inflation of the 1970s and 1980s.

I fear the same thing could easily be done to existing LETSystems.  The
Determined Defenders of the Status Quo (DDotSQ) from Chatham House and Pratt
House will simply have the media call LETSystems a "Socialist" notion, a
threat to free enterprise, a threat to personal liberty, and a threat to
American values and before you know it, LETSystems will be as scarce as copies
of Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice, copies of his RIGHTS OF MAN, part 2, or
copies of Moses' Twelve Moral Commandments.  Since the above three respondents
did not address any particular aspect of the Global Model at URL
 I would like to respond to a
private e-mail that was not posted to list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.

A list owner, who thinks that my posts contain too much red meat for the
delicate tastes of the list membership, writes:

>> Can you possibly tell me over which time period you see Sterling "going
down" and Dollar taking its place? Can you illustrate or "prove" it? If yes,
with which data?

The trouble is that EURO is fashioned totally after the Dollar and nobody sees
it...<<
~~ End list owners request 

My thesis is: that Sterling (the British Empire) reached its apogee of wealth
and power somewhere between 1900 and World War I, tha

FW Monthly Reminder

[S. Lerner]

   *FUTUREWORK LISTS MONTHLY REMINDER*

  FUTUREWORK: Redesigning Work, Income Distribution, Education

FUTUREWORK is an international e-mail forum for discussion of how to
deal with the new realities created by economic globalization and
technological change. Basic changes are occurring in the nature of work
in all industrialized countries. Information technology has hastened the
advent of the global economic village. Jobs that workers at all skill
levels in developed countries once held are now filled by smart machines
and/or in low-wage countries.  Contemporary rhetoric proclaims the need
for ever-escalating competition, leaner and meaner ways of doing
business, a totally *flexible* workforce, jobless growth.

What would a large permanent reduction in the number of secure,
adequately-waged jobs mean for communities, families and individuals?
This is not being adequately discussed, nor are the implications for
income distribution and education. Even less adequately addressed are
questions of how to take back control of these events, how to turn
technological change into the opportunity for a richer life rather than
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Our objective in creating this list is to involve as many people as
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Re: Some thoughts on one of the threads

[Marc Sobel]

Good point.  One of my favorite thought experiments is to take the assumption
that technology makes it possible for most people to have what only the rich
could afford a few (years, product cycles, generations) ago.  I was struck by
this when I visited FDR's home in Hyde Park New York and saw all the gadgets he
had to do what comes easily to us.

A corollary of this is to think about how the rich live (or lived).  Was Mr
Darcy (hero of Pride and Prejudice) remorseful because he didn't have job
satisfaction ?

I am also leary of arguments about man's nature.  They often turn out to be
justifications for policy.  For example, until Hoover died, blacks just didn't
seem to be able to perform as FBI agents and everyone knows that women are
obviously too frail to vote..

Bring on the robots. Maybe they can do my taxes (say what about a tax program ?)

Marc Sobel

Thomas Lunde wrote:

> Thomas:
>
> After plowing through 80 E Mails, I don't have the energy to go back and
> look for comments, but on reading a book review on ROBOT by Hans Moravic
> posted on the Net from Wired, I was struck by this sentence:
>
> Quote:
>
> Moravec argues that the concept of work was unknown before agriculture and
> the industrial revolution and that we'll get rid of it permanently within a
> few decades, when smart machines free us not only from household chores, but
> also from exhausting tasks such as writing computer software or managing
> corporations.  Contrary to popular fears, we'll celebrate our redundancy
> because, as hunter-gatherers, indolence and unemployment are part of our
> evolutionary heritage.
>
> Thomas:
>
> It was the last sentence that resonated within me.  I have long felt that we
> deny ourselves one of our birthrights - indolence and unemployment.  I enjoy
> immensely - doing little or nothing and I enjoy immensely - the pleasure of
> following my impulses.  Work and employment destroy those natural human
> attributes and make them into leisure activities that can only be indulged
> in after worshipping at the alter of employment.  Biologically, I think we
> are not workers, but livers of life.  I for one, welcome a future of leisure
> and indolence.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Thomas Lunde

Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.

[P.A. Gantt]

"P.A. Gantt" wrote:

> Speaking of democracy... it is an opiate only if
> we Netizens stand by and let the ubiquitous "they"
> take the First Amendment away from us by pricing
> us out of the Net. I will send an easy form
> and ways to address this pressing issue
> in my next send.
> 
> =


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Why the Internet is important to:

protect???
keep reasonable,???
accessible???

I find one of it's best is
access to information on an almost real-time basis
to discerning citizens not ready to take the media
at face value but willing to research.

researching... researching... researching...


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BOARDS, COMMISSIONS, AND COMMITTEES

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QUASI-OFFICIAL AGENCIES

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Go to: 

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Constituent Email to House of Representatives

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http://www.senate.gov/senators/index.cfm

  Senators of the 106th Congress use the one above!
New alphabetical listing

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-- 
P.A. Gantt, Computer Science Technology Instructor
Electronic Media Design and Support Homepage
http://user.icx.net/~pgantt/
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=etech
http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/vision/1998-11.asp
Common sense is not common, and conventional wisdom is not
wisdom. But at least you can have conventional sense. ~~ Daily Whale

Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.

[P.A. Gantt]

Speaking of democracy... it is an opiate only if
we Netizens stand by and let the ubiquitous "they"
take the First Amendment away from us by pricing
us out of the Net. I will send an easy form
and ways to address this pressing issue
in my next send.

=
Source:

Special Report from IDG.net
>From 240+ Web sites, quality computing
intelligence you need every day. 

The FCC's ruling today on calls to local ISPs
has resulted in a
  record amount of traffic to IDG.net. To help you
understand the
issues behind this complicated story, the
editors at IDG.net
  created this special newsletter.

 FCC rules ISP calls are long-distance in
nature
   (Source: Network World Fusion) In a
long-anticipated vote, the
   U.S. Federal Communications Commission decided
that dial-up
  Internet calls are interstate in nature and
not local. 
http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=58646

   The FCC: No friend of local government
   (Source: The Industry Standard) [OPINION]
Although the FCC
  has set up a state and local government advisory
committee to
represent local governments in areas such as
right-of-way
   management and taxation, the committee does not
appear to
  carry much weight in policy-setting. (Miles
Fidelman) 
http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=58648

   FCC avoids new broadband regulations
(Source: Computerworld) The U.S. Federal
Communications
Commission tiptoed around calls for new
broadband-service
regulations in a report on the status of
advanced
 telecommunications services in the country. 
http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=58650

   1999 brings talk of new Net legislation
  (Source: The Industry Standard) The challenge of
governing the
Net has given Congress a full plate. On the
agenda: privacy,
 encryption, gambling and the FCC. 
http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=58652

 1999 will be the year of the Bills, bills,
and bills
  (Source: InfoWorld Electric) [OPINION] Internet
bills are being
 passed at accelerating rates by various
legislatures -- on
taxation, censorship, privacy, etc. It's not
going to work to
 simply oppose them all. We do need law and
order on the
Internet. (Bob Metcalfe) 
http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=58654

 Computerworld's collection of FCC resources
(Source: Computerworld) Provides links to FCC
Access Fee
Reform pages, the National ISDN Forum, Internet
Access
Coalition papers and more online FCC
resources. 
http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=58656

Today's top news headlines from CNN
(Source: CNN) Top business, financial, U.S., and
world news
   briefs updated 24 hours a day, seven days a
week.
  http://www.cnn.com/QUICKNEWS/idg/ 

   Find an information-technology gathering near
you
(Source: IDG.net) IDG.net offers six ways to
help you find
appropriate trade shows and conferences anywhere
in the
   world.
   http://www.idg.net/events
-- 
P.A. Gantt, Computer Science Technology Instructor
Electronic Media Design and Support Homepage
http://user.icx.net/~pgantt/
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=etech
http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/vision/1998-11.asp
Common sense is not common, and conventional wisdom is not
wisdom. But at least you can have conventional sense. ~~ Daily Whale

Re: competition/contradiction

[Christoph Reuss]

Thomas Lunde wrote:
> I enter this fray with some trepitation, but I have a point to make.

Have no fear, I don't bite. :-)  (Not even those who make wrong points, har
har)


> One of
> the myth's of capitalism is stated by Chris above.  The implication is that
> there would be no or limited innovation without the goad of competition and
> there is truth in that statement.  However, what may be good in moderation
> may not be good in excess

I think that was my point:  It takes both, cooperation and competition.
However, Eva seemed to advocate the _absence_ of competition.


> and I would opine that improvements are in the
> excessive stage, creating a lack of durability as a design feature, vast
> misuse of resources, complications caused by obsolence and host of other
> negative features such as the great variety of parts and technical skills
> needed to keep up with the constant innovation.  Y2K may be one example of
> the effects of what might in one circumstance be a positive but because of
> the efficiencies of capitalism, a simple error in structure was never
> corrected and we may now pay the costs for all that neglect in the constant
> drive to build a new and better computer or software program.

Let's compare Wintel PCs with Apple Macintosh.  The former historically is
a quasi-monopoly/cartel (weak competition), the latter was a small "David
against Goliath" company, very innovative, with strong competiton from
the PC cartel.  Now, WHERE do we find
> a lack of durability as a design feature,
> vast misuse of resources
> and host of other
> negative features such as the great variety of parts and technical skills
> needed to keep up with the constant innovation,
and
> Y2K
  ???

You've guessed it:  In the former, not in the latter.
I and many others have been using the same Mac for 7+ years, while a PC
is usually outdated (or defective) after 1-3 years.  I never visited a
Mac course (superfluous), while PC users have to learn a new system
virtually every year (DOS 3,5,6, Win3.0, Win3.11fWg, Win95, WinNT, Win98,..).
Ask any company manager how much they spend for PC upgrades every year,
to pay for new options they never need and for bug-fixes of bugs that _they_
had to beta-test in the first place.  The hardware/software update "arms race"
in the Wintel world is NOT due to competition, but due to a lack of
(corporate) alternatives to the Wintel cartel.
Sure, the salesmen of software, hardware, courses, books etc. are fond of
the PC system!  It creates helluva lot of jobs for them (and the PR industry
-- Gates has 500 PR professionals and spent $200 million for the Win95 PR
campaign alone), so how can you oppose such a cartel ?  Hey, you're killing
jobs. 

--Chris

Re: Mysteries of the Calendar

[Christoph Reuss]

REH forwarded:
> Questioning the calendar
>By Stephen Jay Gould
...
> MYSTERIES OF THE CALENDAR
> Why do we base calendars on cycles at all? Why do we recognize a
> thousand-year interval with no tie to any natural cycle?

Being "a distinguished professor of zoology", Stephen Jay Gould should know
why:  We count in the decimal system because we have 10 fingers.  Thus, we
have partitioned the time scale in decades, centuries and millenniums of
10, 100 and 1000 years.  If we would have 8 fingers, we would count in the
octal system, and a millennium would have 8^3 = 512 years.  Computers have
2 'fingers', so to speak (voltage states 0 and 1), so they count in the
binary system.  Decimal numbers and calculations have to be programmed,
and that's where the millennium bug enters the game.  Merely 4 bytes would
be enough to encode the seconds of 136 years (starting e.g. from 01-01-1904)
and to calculate the _4-digit_ year, month, day, hour, minute and second
from this 4-byte-value.  Actually, that's how Macintosh computers handled
time data from the start -- that's why Macs don't have the Y2K bug.
Unfortunately, the programmers of IBM et al. didn't have this idea, so they
wasted 2 bytes for the _2-digit_ year only, and that's why we'll be in a mess
pretty soon.  It would only be fair to use a part of Gates' $80 billion to
clean up the mess...

--Chris

Re: competition/contradiction

[Steve Kurtz]

Thomas Lunde wrote:
> 
> Chris wrote:
> 
> The point is that competition gives an incentive to build better products
> >than the competitors.  

> Thomas:
> One of
> the myth's of capitalism is stated by Chris above.  The implication is that
> there would be no or limited innovation without the goad of competition and
> there is truth in that statement.  However, what may be good in moderation
> may not be good in excess and I would opine that improvements are in the
> excessive stage,

What exists now with huge TNC dominance of global mkts isn't increasing
competition; it's decreasing it. Takeovers, mergers, secret price fixing, and
cases like sterile gentech seeds, are IMO classically monopolistic
(anti-competitive). The smaller, local/regional businesses usually can't compete
on price (quality/safety is not always easily judged by consumers), & if any
small guys do compete pretty well, the big guys try to buy them ASAP. I've seen
my mouthwash - Viadent(vegetable base) get bought by Colgate Palmolive. Next
thing they did was come out with a totally different product, same name but
called "better tasting formula". It was a totally different formula with no
'sanguinaria'(sp.?). They still sell the original one, much better IMO, but can
stop anytime they choose. 

Competition is more players/products, not fewer. Myth is that increased
competition is destroying product quality. Globalisation & monopolisation look
like the culprits to me.

Steve
-- 

"To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being 
paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, 
in our age, can still do for those who study it."
Bertrand Russell,  "A History of Western Philosophy"

Some thoughts on one of the threads

[Thomas Lunde]

Thomas:

After plowing through 80 E Mails, I don't have the energy to go back and
look for comments, but on reading a book review on ROBOT by Hans Moravic
posted on the Net from Wired, I was struck by this sentence:

Quote:

Moravec argues that the concept of work was unknown before agriculture and
the industrial revolution and that we'll get rid of it permanently within a
few decades, when smart machines free us not only from household chores, but
also from exhausting tasks such as writing computer software or managing
corporations.  Contrary to popular fears, we'll celebrate our redundancy
because, as hunter-gatherers, indolence and unemployment are part of our
evolutionary heritage.

Thomas:

It was the last sentence that resonated within me.  I have long felt that we
deny ourselves one of our birthrights - indolence and unemployment.  I enjoy
immensely - doing little or nothing and I enjoy immensely - the pleasure of
following my impulses.  Work and employment destroy those natural human
attributes and make them into leisure activities that can only be indulged
in after worshipping at the alter of employment.  Biologically, I think we
are not workers, but livers of life.  I for one, welcome a future of leisure
and indolence.

Respectfully,

Thomas Lunde

Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.

[Eva Durant]

> 
> Eva, I give up. I'm sorry if I was bad mannered. But you do seem to argue
> from an impenetrable ideology. Let me explain my point of view, perhaps
> equally impenetrable.  Some years ago, I arrived at the conclusion that
> idealism and ideology are the worst things that have ever happened to
> humankind, even though I know that they go with the territory of being
> human.
> 
> What has happened time and again in history is that great ideas have become
> religious or secular ideologies which have then become mantras and formulas,
> which have then been fanaticized, and have then become marching boots. Look
> at Christ becoming the Crusades, Calvin and the Inquisition; at Hegel and
> Marx becoming Stalin and the gulag; at Nietche becoming Hitler and the gas
> chambers. Because of the ever-present possibility of this sequence, I would
> be apprehensive about a motivated and mobilized working class which has
> achieved "consciousness" in accordance with some ideal or ideology. Would
> its members, like Mao's Red Guards, begin to turf the capitalists wherever
> they thought they found them?
>


So, what you propose is, that we
never ever analyse our history and think about
how to avoid past pittfalls and make 
a plan for a better future?

All the past ideology failed, because all the movements
were taken over at some point - usually at the very
beginning - by non-democratic processes, that did
not allow the continuous re-examination of the aims, 
tactics and strategy - which is the core of a democratic
movement.

You probably say there is no point in
such analysis, all human effort ends of
being animal-like hierarchival and
democracy is an unnatural phenomena...
...  and I don't agree, does this amount to "inpenetrable
ideology"?  Afterall, I only argue for democracy,
and even some capitalists seem to be in favour of that... 
...allegedly.


once we manage
to be aware of the importance of maintaining
the democratic process, we can work out how best
to guard it from any deformation - we've seen it
often enough, surely you clever people can
come up with something - 


> I do recognize that it is not idealism itself, but the distortion of
> idealism into iron-clad ideologies, that is the fault.  Yet I would suggest
> that such distortion is more the rule than the exception. While I haven't
> lost sleep over it yet, I know that there are many millions of angry people
> around just waiting for the next great distortion and the next great
> crusade. If you could assure me that we could proceed to the ideal state
> owned and operated by the working class without persecution and bloodshed, I
> would buy it, but, knowing something of history and its ability to repeat
> itself, I might be pretty hard to convince.
>

I think only the development of
democracy can protect us from future bloodshed.
I've just seen some frightening docu
about the KKK and it's ilk in the US
having a major upswing. And one knows when
an ideology is problematic, not only
from the hate content, but also from
the hierarchical, militaristic character of
the organization.

(What was also shown, that they are able to 
grow in the present climate of capitalist
"all for oneself" ideology with the
complementary emotional desolation.
They interviewed an ex-member of 
one of these groups, and asked him why he joined.
He said these were the first bunch of people ever
to send him birthdaycards...)
 
> I recognize that people's lives are organized around work.  But I would
> argue that, in doing their work, people in general have little in common
> other than having to get out of bed and having to go to a place of work.
> People who do a particular kind of work or who work in a particular
> establishment have common interests, and if these are not being satisfied,
> they should take collective action, but action through negotiation and a
> democratically derived system of laws, with strikes as an ultimate threat.
> There are many instances in which broadly based opposition to unjust laws or
> circumstances make sense, but the issues in question usually transcend the
> interests of a particular group or class.  Poverty and homelessness, for
> example, require the attention of all members of society.  But on all such
> issues, I would like to think that whatever action is taken would be aimed
> at solving the problem, not at restructuring us into conformity with some
> ideological dogma about how a society should function.  We've surely had
> enough of that.
>

You miss the important point: there is a very obvious
and sufficient common denominator: we are forced to
work to earn a living, and the majority of
us has no say in the process at all, and a large
portion do not get even enough to live in dignity,
for their troubles.  Our lives are dependent on the
tiny layer, that owns our means of productions;
building, land, machinary etc, and most unfortunately
makes the decision for our military/economist/environmentalist
strategists, and it doesn't look li

Re: [GKD] Training Y2K Specialists

[Thomas Lunde]

Dear Henry:

If you have been following the answers, including your own, there does not
seem to be any pattern or truth to emerge out of my question.  "Where is the
demand for trained people, given the urgency of the problem and the funds
projected to be spent?"  Rather than the answers providing a conclusive
answer, the none answer that emerges from conflicting answers - is an answer
within itself.  I would sum it up as - "we just don't know".  I recently
received a copy of a Canadian Government Report that equates Y2K with the
1st and 2nd World Wars and the Great Depression as one of the defining
events of the century.  This is definitely in the big leagues as problems
go.

And yet in reviewing those events mentally, one has to ask, are we in 1936
or 1939 and what is the equivalency of 1915, 1933 and 1942, that we are yet
to experience?  The future is always murky.  There are a billion plans going
on, from building a new house, to reforming Social Security to picking next
years vacation date.  The fact that there has been a linearity for the last
50 years in which the appearance of predictability was our operating norm.
Perhaps we are at the edge of the whirlpool, about to start that great
centrigal movement that goes faster and faster and as we near the vortex, we
will be shot out into a future so different from all our current logics and
assurances that the differences are unthinkable.

When I think this way, I must ask; is Y2K the triggering event, the march
into Poland, or is the final piece of the puzzle, like the attack on Pearl
Harbour that completed the chessboard of World War 2.  Our leaders ooze
complancey, don't worry, be happy, the final ballroom dance on the Titantic
is all glitter - when we appear the strongest, are we the most vulnerable?
Well, so much for doom and gloom reflections.

Respectfully,

Thomas Lunde

Subject: Re: [GKD] Training Y2K Specialists


>Hi Thomas and all
>
>Your apparent dilemma arises, in my humble opinion, out of a couple of
>things:
>
>- India has over the last 10 or so years, it may even be longer, set
>itself up as a major exporter of code. During this time they have
>built up a large core of very good programming skill who not only can
>read programs specs but can also read write and test code.
>
>- Other countries, SA, the USA, etc have a shortage of skills.
>Systems are not always properly documented having been written over
>a long period of time.
>
>While many countries have large populations we have not, as a national
>priority,
>ensured that there is a large skills pool in the way that India, and
>I think, Brazill have. In many cases free enterprise as ensured that
>some kind of balance has existed between supply and demand.
>
>Because its cheaper to import trained staff than to train them,
>the USA has actively sort to recruit skiled staff from outside its
>borders, as highlighted by its playing around with green card
>quotas last year.
>
>Interestingly enough though I had some correspondence with someone
>from west Africa, I forget the state, who said they had many people
>with computer skills but few jobs. Why are they not relocated? I
>suspect because of language and background differences which make
>them less usefull in a foreign country.
>
>
>- Your analagy with the appliance repair business is a good one because
>it serves to highlight the fact that untrained, in your case a year
>if I read you correctly, technicians will take longer to ffind and
>fix a problem.
>
>We dont have time now to give people even a three month crash course
>and let them learn on the job.
>
>It is also true that a technician with documentation will be much
>quicker and more certain, than one without.
>Much of this code is old and the documentation dodgy in the extreme.
>
>Hope this adds more to the debate.
>
>Henry
>
>
>
>"The old Chinese curse appears to be upon us,
> we live in interesting times!"
>=
>Subscribe to the IT Digest, an information resource from Wits Univ.
>Send e-Mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]  with SUBSCRIBE ITDIGEST
>and {your_user_id} in the body followed by END on the next line.
>--
>Henry C Watermeyer 'Phone +27-11-716-3260/8000
>Director - Computer & Network services Fax+27-11-339-1225
>University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
>P/Bag 3, Wits 2050, South Africa   mobile +27-(0)82-800-8862
> //SunSITE.Wits.ac.za  //WWW.Wits.ac.za
>==
>
>
>

Re: competition/contradiction

[Thomas Lunde]

Chris wrote:

The point is that competition gives an incentive to build better products
>than the competitors.  If there's only one company that builds cars, they
>have no incentive to improve the quality of their cars, because everyone
>who buys a car has no choice but to buy _their_ car.

Thomas:

I enter this fray with some trepitation, but I have a point to make.  One of
the myth's of capitalism is stated by Chris above.  The implication is that
there would be no or limited innovation without the goad of competition and
there is truth in that statement.  However, what may be good in moderation
may not be good in excess and I would opine that improvements are in the
excessive stage, creating a lack of durability as a design feature, vast
misuse of resources, complications caused by obsolence and host of other
negative features such as the great variety of parts and technical skills
needed to keep up with the constant innovation.  Y2K may be one example of
the effects of what might in one circumstance be a positive but because of
the efficiencies of capitalism, a simple error in structure was never
corrected and we may now pay the costs for all that neglect in the constant
drive to build a new and better computer or software program.

Respectfully,

Thomas Lunde

Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.

[Ray E. Harrell]

A little fun from one of my favorite writers on science, life and attitudes.

REH



Questioning the calendar

A skeptic confronts the millennium
   By Stephen Jay Gould


Feb. 26 —  We have a false impression, buttressed by some
famously exaggerated testimony, that the universe runs with
the regularity of an ideal clock, and that God must therefore
be a consummate mathematician.


GALILEO DESCRIBED THE COSMOS as “a grand book written
in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles,
circles and other geometric figures.” The Scottish biologist D’arcy
Thompson, one of my earliest intellectual heroes and author of the
incomparably well-written Growth and Form, (first published in 1917
and still vigorously in print, the latest edition with a preface by
yours truly) stated that “the harmony of the world is made manifest
in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of
Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical
beauty.”


THE DIVINE MATHEMATICIAN
Many scientists have invoked this mathematical regularity to
argue, speaking metaphorically at least, that any creating God must
be a mathematician of the Pythagorean school.
For example, the celebrated physicist James Jeans wrote: “From
the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the
Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.” This
impression has also seeped into popular thought and artistic
proclamation. In a lecture delivered in 1930, James Joyce defined the
universe as “pure thought, the thought of what, for want of a better
term, we must describe as a mathematical thinker.”

MYSTERIES OF THE CALENDAR
Why do we base calendars on cycles at all? Why do we recognize a
thousand-year interval with no tie to any natural cycle?

If these paeans and effusions were invariably true, I could
compose my own lyrical version of the consensus. For I have
arrived at the last great domain for millennial questions —
calendrics. I need to ask why calendrical issues have so fascinated
people throughout the ages, and why so many scholars and
mathematicians have spent so much time devising calendars and
engaging in endless debates about proper versus improper,
elegantly simple versus overly elaborate, natural versus contrived
systems for counting seconds, minutes, hours days, weeks,
months, lunation, years, decades, centuries and millennia, tuns and
baktuns, thirish and karanas, ides and nones.

SIGNIFICANCE OF 1,000
Our culturally contingent decision to recognize millennia and to
impose divisions by 1,000 upon a solar system that includes no
such natural cycle, adds an important ingredient to this maelstrom
of calendrical debate.

If God were Pythagoras in Galileo’s universe, calendrics would
never have become an intellectual subject at all. The relevant cycles
for natural timekeeping would all be nice, crisp easy multiples of
each other — and any fool could simply count. We might have a
year (earth around sun) with exactly ten months (moon around
earth) and with precisely one hundred days (earth around itself) to
the umpteenth and ultimate decimal point of conceivable rigor in
measurement.

But God, thank goodness, includes both Loki and Odin, the
comedian and the scholar, the jester and the saint. God did not
fashion a very regular universe after all. And we poor sods of his
image are therefore condemned to struggle with calendrical
questions till the cows come home, and Christ comes round again
to inaugurate the millennium.

NATURE’S SYMMETRY

Oh, I don’t deny that some corners of truly stunning
mathematical regularity grace the cosmos in domains both large and
small. The cells of a honeybee’s hive, the basalt pillars of the
Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland make pretty fair and regular
hexagons. Many “laws” of nature can be written in an
astonishingly simple and elegant mathematical form. Who would
have thought that E=mc2 could describe the unleashing of the
prodigious energy in an atom?

But we have been oversold on nature’s mathematical regularity
— and my opening quotations in this essay stand among the worst
offenders. If anything, nature is infinitely diverse and constantly
surprising — in J.B.S. Haldane’s famous words, “not only queerer
than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

BLOODY-MINDED NATURE

I call this “bloody-minded nature” because I wish to specify the
two opposite domains of nature’s abject refusal to be
mathematically simple for meaningful reasons. The second domain
forces every complex society — as all have independently done,
from Egypt to China to Mesoamerica — to struggle with
calendar-making as a difficult and confusing subject, not a simple
matter of counting.

Many questions about the millennium — Why do we base
calendars on cycles at all? Why do we recognize a thousand-year
interval with no tie to any natural cycle? — arise directly from these
imposed complexities. Any adequate account of our current
millennial madness therefore requires that we understand why

Re: Democracy & sociocybernetics

[Bob McDaniel]

Given the recent introduction into futurework discussions of the concepts of
chaordics, heterarchy, complexity, hierarchy, the shorter work-week, genetic
engineering, animal and human evolution, the recent book Robot by Hans Moravec
 may be of interest to list
subscribers.

The book updates ideas in the following:

The cybernated space-economy

The digital environment

Future communities

Possibly appropriate fare on the verge of the 21st century.

Bob


--
___
http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/