From extropians-request@extropy.org Wed Jan 26 15:29:17 1994 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA00827; Wed, 26 Jan 94 15:29:14 PST Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from news.panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA13935; Wed, 26 Jan 94 15:27:57 PST Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by news.panix.com id AA26827 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for more@usc.edu); Wed, 26 Jan 1994 18:00:53 -0500 Date: Wed, 26 Jan 1994 18:00:53 -0500 Message-Id: <199401262300.AA26827@news.panix.com> To: Extropians@extropy.org From: Extropians@extropy.org Subject: Extropians Digest #94-1-523 - #94-1-539 X-Extropian-Date: January 26, 374 P.N.O. [18:00:18 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: RO Extropians Digest Wed, 26 Jan 94 Volume 94 : Issue 25 Today's Topics: An Ode to May [1 msgs] Can we get a list of the rest of the subjects? [1 msgs] Eco-Fascist Tendencies [2 msgs] ECON: A common error [1 msgs] Fractal compression and Internet commerce [1 msgs] META: Will we ever get along? [1 msgs] NEWS: Gorby in Parade [1 msgs] Pancritical Rationalism [1 msgs] PPL: There WILL be inter-PPL negotiations [2 msgs] Product contest [1 msgs] Safe Cars [1 msgs] SEMANTICS: Faith [1 msgs] The Go-Go Future [1 msgs] TV: Just saw Babylon 5. [1 msgs] Yale-boy responds [1 msgs] Administrivia: Note: I have increased the frequency of the digests to four times a day. The digests used to be processed at 5am and 5pm, but this was too infrequent for the current bandwidth. Now digests are sent every six hours: Midnight, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. If you experience delays in getting digests, try setting your digest size smaller such as 20k. You can do this by addressing a message to extropians@extropy.org with the body of the message as ::digest size 20 -Ray Approximate Size: 51388 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: kwatson@netcom.com (Kennita Watson) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 1994 17:26:26 -0800 Subject: [#94-1-523] An Ode to May For worthier nemesis one might not hope: Possessed of steel-trap mind and rapier wit, Who, joined in battle, brings his all to it, And proudly wears the blazon "Misanthrope". Cats, computers, freedom, privacy Are chief among the interests most are shown. Close to his heart the others rest unknown: "For true friends only" is his policy. Postings long and short and in-between, Serious, humorous, bitter, brash, or mild -- Each with a message, hidden or made plain; "There's more to life!" -- now he departs our scene, Leaving behind him who knows what brainchild, That he may hope he did not write in vain. Kennita Watson 1/25/94 Go your way merry, Mr. May. Kennita ------------------------------ From: "Phil G. Fraering" Date: Tue, 25 Jan 1994 19:35:17 -0600 Subject: [#94-1-524] NEWS: Gorby in Parade Ray, one interesting piece of propaganda... the reason Americans use some forty percent of the energy is scandalous, because we're probably responsible for much more than forty percent of the world's energy extraction/collection mechanisms. America even has engineers working in the industries of Libya and Vietnam (where my brother-in-law's sister is apparently running a training school for Shell), not to mention the ongoing repair of the Former Soviet Union's oil infrastructure after what Gorby and his friends did to it. Phil ------------------------------ From: "Phil G. Fraering" Date: Tue, 25 Jan 1994 19:50:56 -0600 Subject: [#94-1-525] ECON: A common error >Goods are made from raw materials -- the majority from plastic, metal, >or wood -- Plastic can be made from basically any organic material + energy. Metals can be made from any low grade ore (of which there's enough for the next twenty thousand years or more at a much higher level of consumption) plus energy; wood hmm, wood will probably be scarce. Well, maybe it means people will plant more trees, which will be good. >Oil used to bubble from the ground, remember? That was never a real resource, it was only used as an indicator to where the resource could be found. Please remember, the first fossil fuel besides coal that was used industrially was natural gas, in "medieval" China, found accidentally by groups that were drilling hundreds to over a thousand feet for brine. (They couldn't really store it with any real success, but they did try, and their methods did work, a little...) Anyway, thanks to all of these computer thingeys everyone has, they are now able to find more oil than ever before. Environmentally I think it's probably a poor idea to use the oil instead of nuclear, or fusion, or beamed powe from outer space, all of which I think are near term or past term solutions to the energy problem. And as I said earlier, that's the only real restricted resource (except for human talent, which is to me what this list is about). Phil (You know, it still blows my mind, that the Chinese started this. Not that they're not intelligent, or anything like that, although to read a modern American "world" history textbook you probably won't find that out. What really blows my mind is, they did it with *WOOD*.) ------------------------------ From: "Phil G. Fraering" Date: Tue, 25 Jan 1994 23:06:28 -0600 Subject: [#94-1-526] TV: Just saw Babylon 5. "I liked it. It was better than Cats. I'm going to see it again and again." Seriously, X-People, I just saw the first episode, "Midnight on the Firing Line," and it was _excellent_. Don't believe all the bad press. The Narn have obviously paid them off. (I guess I'm one of the lucky few who gets to see B5 on Tuesdays, before most of the US; of course, I had to pay a heavy price, having to watch a lot of the State of the Union address, and Robert Dole's rebuttal (for which I actually turned on the sound; hell, I could have done better than that. Even a democrat could have done a better rebuttal than that).) It's not a pretty future (and that part is done right; when most producers think of a gritty future they go film in a landfill full of TRS-80's) but in many ways it seems to me to be pretty realistic (flamers expousing the Singularity and uploading coming in the next twenty minutes will be ignored, even though that one was a good show too). Loads more realistic than Star Drek. I guess, to answer the departed Tim May, that it looks like a neuro- stimulant. What happened to Ivanova's mom, for instance, would not have happened on TNG or DS9, but would probably be the sort of thing that would, were her skills discovered tomorrow. (Trying hard not to spoil it). Well, anyway, enjoy! Phil ------------------------------ From: jdwilson@gold.chem.hawaii.edu (Jim Wilson (VA)) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 94 19:26:14 HST Subject: [#94-1-527] Can we get a list of the rest of the subjects? For those of us who miss the news, could someone please post each poll question and address for response? Mahalo nui loa (thanks very much) in advance, -Jim Wilson Paradise, HI ------------------------------ From: LEVY%LENNY@venus.cis.yale.edu Date: Wed, 26 Jan 1994 01:49:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [#94-1-528] PPL: There WILL be inter-PPL negotiations Mike Price writes: > Simon!: > > If neither A nor B is a member of PPL1, I will of course not > > listen to charges from either. > Simon! has confirmed that this means there will be no inter-PPL > mediation. Remember, an essential component of a PPL system is a system > for resolving *inter*-PPL matters. In other words the PPL system is > _not_ being tested here. I don't recall ever claiming that there will be no inter-PPL mediation. Please clarify your claim, Mike! What I meant by the statement was that I have no intention of sticking my nose in the affairs of people outside of my PPL. In other words, I want to give PPL's a chance to work, instead of trying to lord it over everyone. If you're not in my PPL, you don't have to follow my rules. If a member of PPL1 gets involved in a dispute with a member of another PPL, I will of course participate in inter-PPL negotiations. -- Simon! ------------------------------ From: jdwilson@gold.chem.hawaii.edu (Jim Wilson (VA)) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 94 21:05:28 HST Subject: [#94-1-529] Product contest Paul E. Baclace said: > respectively). [Note that MathCAD sells the basic system cheap and has > add-ons that cost $250 or so. Wrong. The add-ons are typically $34.95 and they keep writing you every 60 days with a "limited time offer". ------------------------------ From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 2:14:24 WET Subject: [#94-1-530] SEMANTICS: Faith JUMP IN THE FIRE writes: > > The inductive principle simply stated is " The more often things > > are found together, the more probable it becomes that the same > > things will be found together in the future ". > > This is faith supported by a data set of experience. I think this property of humans is more or less builtin to our brains and how they work. It would be better called `confidence factor' Imagine if the brain was a neural network and neuron's stored real numbers in the interval [0,1] Now imagine you were looking at an area being trained to recognize crows. The neurons in this area might bounce around wildly, but each time the person sees a black crow, the the value will be pushed towards a stable equilibrium forcing the person to believe with high confidence that the next crow he will see is black. This is faith based on evidence of the senses. The faith most people have in religion is faith based on imagination and fictional stories. It is _conscious_ faith, rather than the unconcious faith one has after repeatedly being `trained' to recognize something. Most people have `faith' in gravity so they don't jump off buildings in attempts to fly, but this faith is subconscious based on our `data set of experience' I believe strongly in electromagnetic theory because I have done most of the experiments in lab and they match my own predictions based on learned theory. The knowledge has been reinforced by hands on gathering of hard evidence which has increased my confidence that I know the subject matter and that the subject matter is mostly correct. > > I can't prove > > this, it seems to work very well but that proves nothing because > > we can't use induction to prove induction ;so that leaves > > deductive reasoning but I wouldn't know how even to begin to > > prove it with deduction and I don't know anybody who can . > > Therefore you have faith in induction. I have faith that 2+2=4 in the field of integers too, but I wouldn't put it on the same level as religious faith. Human beings would not be able to learn at all if we couldn't use induction. (what algorithm would you use to decide whether you should fundamentally believe in what you senses have told you if not repeatability?) -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | politics is the implementation of faith. -- ------------------------------ From: LEVY%LENNY@venus.cis.yale.edu Date: Wed, 26 Jan 1994 02:23:24 -0500 (EST) Subject: [#94-1-531] Yale-boy responds Vince K. writes: > Simon! sez: > >>Instead of booting or suspending you, I am asking you to leave PPL1 >>and join some other PPL (perhaps Geoff's PPL-A, a.k.a., Anarchy PPL). >>Please do so by the end of this business week. I shall construe a >>failure to do so as evidence of bad faith, and will crank up the >>voltage on the aforementioned fence. >> >>-- Simon! >I could ask you to do the same. By "bad faith", which of the >following do you mean: What I mean, Vince, is that I think you are deliberately trying to provoke me for reasons of your own -- i.e., you are not negotiating in good faith, to use the term from labor relations -- as evidenced by your posting a private message from me to the List, and by the following: > Perhaps someone ought to crank up the voltage in your jodhpurs, > Yale-boy. > Thank you Simon, for your concrete demonstration that perhaps Tim May > was right, and the Extropians are turning into a pack of pro-authority > neophobic toady little Randites. > Or maybe it's just you? I suppose the proper thing to do here would be to charge Vince, who is now a member of PPL-A, with flaming me. Frankly, I am so disgusted with the whole mess that I'll be content to let the rest of the List decide whether Vince's behavior is appropriate. -- Simon! ------------------------------ From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 3:29:57 WET Subject: [#94-1-532] META: Will we ever get along? Why is it that we can't have simple intellectual disagreements without calling each other names? Why is it that we can't stay and negotiate our problems instead of running away? When I think about these things, I don't think the Extropian's community is stable. Extropians seem too thin-skinned. A simple disagreement among friends leads to name calling, then eventually to intense dislike and a pattern of attack, and finally to someone unsubscribing. As Extropians, we are members of a fringe group and our ideas conflict radically with accepted ideas. We can not afford to run away from every debate and we can not afford to act like assholes, especially to one another. We are going to run into big problems in the future with accepted paradigms, so we better resolve the problems among ourselves first. I've lost my cool plenty of times in the past and have snapped at people. Sometimes I apologized, sometimes I ignored the other person, but never have I unsubscribed the list because I disagreed with another member, and I haven't tried to conduct a pattern of attack by insulting or picking apart other people's arguments for the sole purpose of "getting even" We need to keep in mind that we all share common ideas and that fellow extropians are not the enemy. So the next time you disagree with someone, you don't have to unsubscribe -- stay and argue it out. And you don't have to hate everyone who disagrees over minor issues. I noticed this phenomena among objectivists whereby if you don't agree with everything, you are the _enemy_, to be despised and ostracized. If you're not Henry Rearden, you're Jim Taggart. It doesn't have to be like that. -Ray -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | politics is the implementation of faith. -- ------------------------------ From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 09:11:35 GMT Subject: [#94-1-533] PPL: There WILL be inter-PPL negotiations Simon!, as Head of PPL1,: > Mike Price writes: > >> Simon!: > >>> If neither A nor B is a member of PPL1, I will of course not >>> listen to charges from either. > >> Simon! has confirmed that this means there will be no inter-PPL >> mediation. Remember, an essential component of a PPL system is a >> system for resolving *inter*-PPL matters. In other words the PPL >> system is _not_ being tested here. > > I don't recall ever claiming that there will be no inter-PPL > mediation. Please clarify your claim, Mike! My apologies, I obviously got the wrong end of the stick. This is the type of cross talk and confusion that gets generated by pushing discussions of PPL/meta issues off the list!!!!! It was based on our private exchange, which I assume you're allowing me to quote: **************** private exchange start **** SDL> If neither A nor B is a member of PPL1, I will of course SDL> not listen to charges from either. MCP> What if they are a head of a PPL? I thought to have a system MCP> for mediating inter-PPL issues was basic to the PPL concept. SDL> I have argued against the PPL system with other Board members, but SDL> was voted down. So I find it difficult to come up with solutions SDL> to problems like that, seeing as I don't think the PPL system is SDL> appropriate in the first place. At this point, I plan to take SDL> things as they come. ****************** private exchange end ***** I read your response as meaning that you would not be acting as an inter-PPL mediator (which is how I still read it). A perfectly laudable position, especially since as head of PPL1 this position would generate a strong conflict of interest. I believe there a role for a mediator to follow strict rules for inter-PPL matters. (Ideally these inter-PPL rules should be in or referenced by each PPL's charter, but we missed that boat.) And for the mediator _not_ to be the head of a PPL. Tom Morrow would be the best candidate, IMO, if he was available. Otherwise, I volunteer... > What I meant by the statement was that I have no intention of sticking > my nose in the affairs of people outside of my PPL. In other words, > I want to give PPL's a chance to work, instead of trying to lord it > over everyone. If you're not in my PPL, you don't have to follow my > rules. This sounds like you're agreeing with my interpretation of your position. > If a member of PPL1 gets involved in a dispute with a member of > another PPL, I will of course participate in inter-PPL negotiations. ^^^^^^^^^ :-) I'm glad to hear it, but I don't think this was clear earlier. The PPL-A Anarch is not a member of PPL1, therefore I concluded that you would not be lording it over him or sticking your nose in his affairs. Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk AnarchyPPL client ------------------------------ From: tribble@netcom.com (E. Dean Tribble) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 1994 01:36:57 -0800 Subject: [#94-1-534] Pancritical Rationalism PCR just sounds like Fuzzy Logic applied to rationalistic thinking with the extra requirement that nothing can map to a 0 or 1. (all ideas in the set of ideas are paired in (0,1)) And nanotech is just some fancy checmical engineering? This certainly doesn't well capture the fundamental ideas of PCR, though it is superficially similar. I like your examples, though. It's the idea that one must be critical of pancritical rationalism itself that I find strange. It smells like a Russell's Paradox. (how can I apply pancritical rationalism to criticize itself, when the falsification of it would invalidate my analysis? I defer to the philosophy majors on this one) It's not a paradox. If you are using PCR and it results in saying that you shouldn't use PCR, then stop. Once you're not using PCR, there's no reason to start, so there's no contradiction (or rather reasons to start are probably as refutable from other logic systems as they are from PCR). Also, falsification is *not* part of PCR. PCR could be unreliable, yet still be better than the alternatives (I've certainly found ti quite reliable :-) Should pancritical rationalists take PCR as an absolute or make its foundations axiomatic? Absolutely not :-) People using PCR will quickly find it credible enough that they use it consistently, which is "absolute" as is relevant. It is pointedly not axiomatic, because the whole point of PCR is to avoid justificationism; that is, PCR does not require that everything be built on axioms that must then be taken on faith. Thus, PCR does not require faith in anything. dean ------------------------------ From: starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 9:34:45 GMT Subject: [#94-1-535] Eco-Fascist Tendencies Mr. Grigsby seems to be suffering from some misconceptions: >From: grigsby@agames.com (JUMP IN THE FIRE) > >I have not said that all resources are soon exhausted, but given the >dependency of manufacturing on multiple raw materials, a shortage of one >will often cause problems in other areas... This is a truism. Congratualtions, Mr. Grigsby, you've just made a particular argument of the general kind: market failure - resource depletion. The reply is: 1) almost all historical cases of resource depletion have not been market failures, but caused by factors exogenous to the market, such as the State. 2) Most of the actual market-failure resource depletions that have occurred have been exagerrated, or the risk that they will happen has been. 3) The market contains self-correcting mechanisms for failures. They aren't perfect, but they beat anything else. The only alternative to the market is the initiation of force/fraud. Since it doesn't follow from the existence or risk of market failures that any coercive corrective attempt is justified, you have to show two things in order to make that case: 1) it's possible for the market failure to be corrected coercively, and 2) it's possible for this to be done without "creating a monster," that is, without causing worse failures than the one you're trying to get corrected. Further, suffice it to say that we think that it's impossible for anything to survive that analytic gauntlet. You're welcome to try, but be warned of the seriousness of the task and how little patience some of us may have with cloying questions such as: >What does the >Earth look like when you're done extracting all of them? Ever seen >open-pit mines? Ever driven through Fresno? What about the monthly >oil spills that crap up beaches around the world? And where do the >people go while this is happening? This sort of thing is very likely to be considered flame-bait by those of us here, and get you into trouble with the list adjudicator. I would advise more carefully selecting an informative tone rather than an argumentative one. >I'm tired of hearing this "it's >not a problem yet, so let's ignore it" non-sense. If so, you haven't heard it here, so quit your bitching and address what claims have been made here. >A forest is a self-sustaining system, while >monocrop farming is not -- it depletes the soil of nutrients and topsoil, >requiring nitrate fertilizers and pesticides to keep the plants healthy. Forests are not self-sustaining systems. They are temporarily stable systems. There is no natural equilibrium state, only processes of expansion and decline. On the other hand, artifice is capable of maintaining systems in more stable states than they would be in naturally, as well as destabilizing others and putting them into decline. Forests have no "self" to sustain anything. Farms have humans do do that. >Over half the wells in farming areas of Iowa and Illinois are undrinkable >by federal standards due to nitrate and pesticide residue. What makes you think those Federal standards have any significance whatsoever? Have you heard how there's more dioxin in "organic" fruits and vegetables than the EPA's maximum allowable doseage for artificial products? And that's for the agency's public enemy #1. You'll have to do better than that to make us care about lesser-prioritized substances. >> The market pricing mechanism would take care >> of the rest. > >Not until the damage has been done. "Oops, no more. Now what?" See above. I saw nothing in the above to support this claim of yours that prices won't take effect until too late, whereas the noble, farsighted souls manning our glorious Federal agencies will know what to do and be able to get it done. Try supporting your claims with argument, rather than reliance upon mere assertion. >> our oil reserves will last for quite a while (I've seen figures of 200-300 >> years _without_ new sources being found)) Think about it, 200-300 >> years? Do you really think our resource use will be so inefficient by >> then? 300 years ago we didn't have an internal combustion engine. > >What is our air going to smell like then? Total Suspended Particulates (TSP) in places like LA have been steadily declining since the 1930s. What scientific evidence do you have that this long-term trend will change? >How much lung cancer do you want >by then? Aside from tobacco-related lung cancer, the incidence of lung cancer in the USA has been declining for decades, when corrected for the increased age of the population. What scientific evidence do you have that this long-term trend will change? >How big a traffic jam do you want to wait in then? Traffic jams are caused by the scarcity of roads, which is caused by their monopolization by the State, not by such market factors as oil or cars. Actually, this is a bit inaccurate. The real problem is road pricing, which is insensitive to demand, leading to shortages (traffic jams) and surpluses (no traffic). This is a case in which the corrective power of the price system is prevented from functioning by coercive intervention. A privatized, competitive road market wouldn't have as much of a problem with this. >> (the eco types were predicting 50 years until our oil runs out in the >> seventies, so if they are right we should be running out by 2020. >> Anyone wanna bet?) > >I don't care when we run out, since I'll bet the consequences of our >oil use catch up with us far before we do. Please specify the terms of the bet: what conditions will satisfy the predictions, the amount of the wager, etc. I need the money. >If cheap, efficient solar cells (for instance) become available, >the price will decline substantially, and the utility monopolies will >have serious problems. Any guess as to why more research isn't done >here? Lemme guess: because any single major city in the USA uses more power than hits the entire surface area of the country from solar radiation? >> The only thing ecocentrists >> seem to be sure of is that pre-industrial society was sustainable. >> (proof lacking of course) Actually, I must offer a moderate correction to Ray here: what they're sure of is the desirability of some (any) equilibrium state of social affairs, as opposed to a process of expansion. >Your implied sarcasm is insulting and wrong. Insulting and wrong? Physician, heal thyself! >A culture that speaks of its >history over thousands of years with certain core values unchanged (Hopi >Indian, for example) can reasonably be said to be sustainable. Or Egyptian. A society in which everyone had a place, and everyone was forced to stay in it or die. How nice. >Most >sustainable cultures have been overrun by non-sustainable ones in search >of more resources. Which is an argument against their alleged "sustainability." If they're incapable of defending themselves against such threats, they are unstable. >I do not advocate a return to such a lifestyle (unless >you really want to) but I do advocate learning what we can from such >cultures. And what is it that we're supposed to learn? How to maintain society in a perpetual state of backwardness? >Besides, do internal-combustion vehicles and no-deposit bottles really >advance the cause of boundless expansion, or any other Extropian >principles? What makes you think they don't? >> The rainforest supermedicine argument sounds like a nice way to entice >> humanocentric people into conserving them, but I think it's a red herring. >> The effort needed to brute-force test every chemical you can find in >> a rainforest is greater than the effort required to just develop the >> drug artificially. > >Maybe if we weren't raping the land, "We" aren't, sir! The Brazilian government's variation on "manifest destiny," in which it's stimulating slash-and-burn cattle ranching is at fault for that. You'd better watch where you point that finger before someone less patient than I chops it off. >My point, which was that sustainability is left out of economic forecasts, >still stands. "Sustainability" being a code-word for an imaginary ecological equilibrium state which, if disturbed by artifical expansion, will avenge itself upon those who dare to challenge their natural lot in life. If this is left out of economic forecasts, then so much the better. Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Think Universally, Act Selfishly - starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu ------------------------------ From: jbaker@halcyon.com (James Baker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 1994 01:39:27 -0800 Subject: [#94-1-536] Safe Cars peb@procase.com Said: > >Somewhere else I heard that bigger, not heavier cars are safer. MV^2 >says that mass is important, but during impact a large car has more >linear crumple space to lower the massive deceleration. Because of >this, I'd like to have a car that gets bigger with speed, but has a >compact size for parking in the city... > On the subject of impact I understand the goal is to reduce peak g forces especially on the head and abdomen. More crumple distance helps, more surface area helps, and decelerating without big spikes in g-force vs. time helps. I too have thought of expanding cars. I was thinking more about reducing wind resistance at high speeds than safety. I imagined clear plastic nosecones that inflate with airpressure through a scoop and retract with elastic straps. Perhaps they could be made tough enough to slow a moving car on impact. For wind resistance reduction a cone on the rear is more important than on the front and this would help in rear end collisions and discourage tailgaters too. James Baker Seattle, WA USA jbaker@halcyon.com ------------------------------ From: starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 9:47:26 GMT Subject: [#94-1-537] Eco-Fascist Tendencies >From: grigsby@agames.com (JUMP IN THE FIRE) > >This is a common fallacy spread by ignorant economists and devious >industrialists. Goods are made from raw materials -- the majority >from plastic, metal, or wood -- all of which are limited resources >taken from the Earth. The raw materials must come from someplace, and >the reason we believe they are free are because we have stripped the >Earth of them at an alarming rate which far exceeds their natural >regeneration. Oil used to bubble from the ground, remember? Yes, and it was considered a nuisance by farmers until the price of whale oil got high enough to encourage experimentation and innovation to develop a way of refining it into a cheaper and more abundant substitute source of fuel. In so doing, entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller, whatever his other faults may have been, saved more whales than Greenpeace ever has or will. >And yes, I call myself an "environmentalist". I will not bet the >future of the Earth against technology's putative future ability to >restore a damaged ecosystem. Remember cane toads, African killer >bees, and Yellowstone National Park, not to mention whatever insane >number of species are driven extinct each month, and how many areas of >climactically important rain forest containing medicinally valuable >herbs (just for starters) are destroyed each minute. Yellowstone is a case of State-failure to manage resources. There's absolutely no verifiable evidence whatsoever of how many species are or are not going extinct at any rate at all, and the rest are either trivial or I've already dealt with them in my other post on this subject. Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Think Universally, Act Selfishly - starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu ------------------------------ From: mlinksva@netcom.com (Michael R Linksvayer) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 1994 01:55:56 -0800 (PST) Subject: [#94-1-538] Fractal compression and Internet commerce This idea was revealed to me after reading the EPs and listening to Max More tapes for sixteen hours, so it must be appropriate... :) Fractal compression, like JPEG and MPEG (for single frames and movies respectively), is a lossy compression method for bitmaps. Fractal compression is expected to take the digital video market by storm in the next few years because it offers two large advantages over *PEG: * It can be decompressed faster, meaning lower hardware requirements for end users. * Image quality holds up even using compression ratios in the 90%s. The decline in quality of a JPEG image at high compression ratios is very apparent. Fractal compression does have one large disadvantage (besides not being first to market): Very, very long compression times. I believe that JPEG compression and decompression take the same or similar amounts of time. Fractal decompression is faster, but compression is orders of magnitude (yes, I need to check on the figures) slower. In the past few weeks I've been doing some work involving digitizing video on a Quadra 840AV and have found that after capturing a clip, high quality compression of just 10 minutes of video at 240x180 takes several hours. If I was using fractal compression at full-screen resolution, the compression would probably take days. There are several other computers in the same room on the same ethernet, most of which sit completely idle at least 16 hours of the day, and even when they are in 'use' are usually wasting millions of cycles each second. Why not use them to speed up compression? If the Quadra were on the Internet, why not use some of the zillions of cycles being wasted every second all over the world? Ok, this isn't a new idea, but I think that video compression, particularly fractal compression, may become the first application that makes distributed computation (probably the wrong buzzword) worth the effort. Another important factor is that with the rapid growth of the Internet and advanced operating systems (that can work on something in the background and not disturb the primary user) and lots of computing power on the desks of peons, the physical infrastructure for distributed computation is just now falling into place. The 'desert' that needs to be crossed in order to jump-start distributed computation is the lack of a market for distributing computation. My point is that fractal compression could make this desert worth crossing. A software/business opportunity? Mike Linksvayer mlinksva@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 10:00:49 GMT Subject: [#94-1-539] The Go-Go Future >From: Duncan Frissell >Date: Mon, 24 Jan 1994 10:59:13 -0500 >Subject: [#94-1-464] The Go-Go Future > >S.>I also think the decline of economic growth, productivity, and >S.>wages is due to regulatory and taxation costs, > >Economic growth, productivity, and wages have not declined. > >Economic growth has slowed. That's what I meant: the rate of growth has declined. Of course, there's the deflationist argument that we're in a period of monetary contraction, making the dollar more valuable relative to goods and services. If this is the case, then the growth rate may well have increased, unless I'm making some silly mistake our resident economists will correct me for. >In the last few years productivity growth (in manufacturing) has speeded >up and is quite high by historic standards. We don't know if the rate of >productivity growth ever declined because we have no decent method of >measuring service sector productivity. (If lawyer X doubles his >production of lawsuits has productivity increased?) There is evidence >that service productivity has been mis-measured and the "productivity >paradox" was caused by bad numbers. I'd think the best way to measure service-sector productivity would be in terms of output per person. Thus, if lawyer X doubles the amount of his billable hours that he collects for his firm, then he's doubled his productivity. >The weekly *wages* of private, non-supervisory, workers have declined in >the last 10-15 years but this does not include *total compensation* which >adds the value of fringe benefits to wages. Additionally, the much touted >figure does not include *government* workers, supervisors, or the >self-employed all of whom had better than average income growth over this >period. That "wage decline" figure is an attack statistic designed to >enable socialists to seize power (it worked). Good point, and one that had temporarily slipped my mind, but non-wage job compensation rose faster for government and supervisory workers than it did for the others, didn't it? The self-employed (and the undocumented) are where it's at. Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Think Universally, Act Selfishly - starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V94 #25 ********************************