Bit-rot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of de Bivort Lawrence Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 1:42 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Cc: 'Keith Hudson' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Trouble, trouble and more trouble What a superb paragraph, Ray. Congratulations, and thank you. "A serious governmental watchdog over the problems is out of the question for the same reason that my student changing short of a career ending disaster was also out of the question. But what are governments for? That's what we are all arguing here. The land issue, paper money, gold, monopoly, councils, aristocracy, etc. Governments should be for the evolution of human consciousness and the continuing upward march of humanity and all life towards more and greater ideals. Mere survival is not worth the evolutionary cost. You have to have bigger goals than that lest you just be a trinkets and trash corner entertainer with a cup. In order to do that you do need standards, serious ideals and practice and less stories. The neo-classic picture of the world is simply beneath the potential of the species and that's a real problem. It's aiming at the telestial mineral world and all of the lower spirits. " Two minor queries? What is "squeak and squeeze"? Can you give an example of bit-rot? Would it occur, say, when I copy the text of a document into another document? Again, thank you for your wonderful paragraph. Cheers, Lawry On Sep 10, 2010, at 12:14 PM, Ray Harrell wrote: Mike and Arthur, Change is very tough and a change in paradigm is worse. I see it all the time on an individual level with students who are committed to their habits. Often loyalty is the issue. I had one student so loyal to her New Jersey squeak and squeeze voice that when she was told that she would have to change it if she wanted to sing in the opera world, she agreed and then didn't. After two years I resolved to try a positive approach and gave her five days a week of lessons on scholarship and made sure that I practiced with her daily. Even with a scholarship worth thousands of dollars she still refused to change although her singing in a significant talent, Improved. Eventually she was two people. Both at odds and in competition with each other for her person. I resolved to let her go on with this and she hit the wall. First she got a node and I sent her to speech therapy and she changed but when the node was gone she changed back. She got a second node and the same thing happened again. Then she got a hemorrhage on the Chords and that got her attention. She stepped back from the cliff, grew up and became the best singer I have ever produced. But she had to give up New Jersey, her family and cultural thoughts about sound and what it meant. She had to give up her identity. Processes are not so different in pedagogy from individuals to groups. Pathologies are pathologies. I think the rule here on this list, and across the world, about technology and economics could best be summed up by the term Clanthink. This morning Obama choose as his new head of economic advisors another University of Chicago Economist. A member of the neo-classic clan and worldview that, in my opinion is stale and finished. It's the same thinking that gave us the Bay of Pigs so many years ago from the best minds in the nation except then they called it "groupthink." Now it's more primal. As for technology, I would suggest that rather than bit-tax, you should think "bit-rot" the problem of information degradation in files that changes pictures and mixes information in subtle ways that is far worse than acid paper or the decay of film. When you copy material that is very particular, complicated and requires specificity, bit-rot changes the material in subtle ways that can be as disastrous as an incompetent accountant working on the national budget. My office now spends many hours of non-productive time double checking anything that has been copied across files. Not to do so has more than once caused the wrong information to be sent out. It's seductive. Because it is subtle, you think it was you and then you find a hard copy with what you remember and you realize it's the fucking machine and the nature of computer technology and a competitive industry with no generic standards. A serious governmental watchdog over the problems is out of the question for the same reason that my student changing short of a career ending disaster was also out of the question. But what are governments for? That's what we are all arguing here. The land issue, paper money, gold, monopoly, councils, aristocracy, etc. Governments should be for the evolution of human consciousness and the continuing upward march of humanity and all life towards more and greater ideals. Mere survival is not worth the evolutionary cost. You have to have bigger goals than that lest you just be a trinkets and trash corner entertainer with a cup. In order to do that you do need standards, serious ideals and practice and less stories. The neo-classic picture of the world is simply beneath the potential of the species and that's a real problem. It's aiming at the telestial mineral world and all of the lower spirits. Is it any wonder that oil and mining is destroying the most beautiful thoughts we have? The natural world. That's just my opinion boys, REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Gurstein Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 8:59 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; 'Keith Hudson' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Trouble, trouble and more trouble I think in addition to what you have said below the role of ICTs have to be included. The development of an integrated instantaneous and extremely powerful communication, information processing, information storage and infomration management capability which is essentially ubiquitous and placeless (in the cloud) really changes the range of options that are available. We (the US) really can't go back to Kansas so the re-nationalization option is not very likely. On the other hand ICTs open up new options for hyperlocalization (p2p) which are starting to spring up in a vast range of areas including production and service delivery. What this means I think is that the middle safe options are increasingly out of reach and the options that are feasible all will require very wrenching changes -- either for the bad (dramatic decline in living/work standards) or for the unknown (dramatic shifts to localized production/distribution/servicing -- and of course overall there are the issues of resource depletion (including peak oil) and climate change which may toss significant spanners into the works -- certainly over the longer term and possibly (through climate and resource supply disruptions) even in the short term. Very unpredictable... M -----Origina l From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2010 7:05 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION'; 'Keith Hudson' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Trouble, trouble and more trouble It is the last para in the article that caught my attention. In this election season, the politicians who are really serious about creating jobs and bringing down <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR201009030 1979.html> unemployment won't be the ones screaming about tax cuts, or stimulus or some imagined government takeover of the economy. They'll be the ones talking about how to make the American economy competitive again. The US economy was moving along and was more or less competitive. The great change happened when competition was opened with countries with dramatically lower wages, labour standards, environmental standards, etc. Against this the US lost ground. Opening the door to China, first with Walmart and then with others following quickly to take advantage of the cost structure abroad has given lower cost products of all kinds to Western consumers at the cost of lost jobs across a broad range of industries. I really can't see how the American economy can become competitive again until a few things happen: living standards and wages decline in the US; wages and living standards rise in China, India, etc. Or as Keith continues to say there is a dramatic new consumer technology which leads to a new industry in the West and which remains in the West long enough to invigorate the entire economy. So the trouble is largely self-inflicted in my view. Short term gains (in price of consumer and a range of industrial products from low cost producers) is now leading to long term pain as jobs disappear, the tax base shrinks, technological skill migrate abroad. And, even worse, as the labour force ages the technology of designing and making things begins to erode simply because there are fewer and fewer entry level positions for new workers who can learn from the older workers. The older workers are gone, many of the industries are in a slump or are gone and so yes there is trouble. (of course you can add to this the financial debacle; Afghanistan, etc.) So we should listen very carefully to those who put forward policies to make the US competitive again. I don't see anything just yet beyond the chestnuts of increased productivity, "smart" innovation, more technology, etc. Arthur From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2010 9:32 AM To: Keith Hudson; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Trouble, trouble and more trouble Good morning (over here) Keith, I'm not denying that the availability of new status goods have had a significant effect in determining economic behaviour, but I think a great deal also depends on how people feel about their world and their ability to do things that can effect it positively. Right now, we are living through a period of doom and gloom compared to how we felt, say, a decade ago and we feel there isn't much we can do about it. People, governments and the economy in general are over leveraged and the value of most peoples prime asset, housing, is falling. Unemployment is high and many people of prime working age have dropped out of the labour force. Some commentators tell us that we are into a double-dip recession, while others tell us to forget about double dip, we are into a recession that will not end for a long time. Non-economic factors feed the dark mood: the high hopes of military action in Iraq and Afghanistan are crashing to the ground. At a time like this, one has to try very very hard to remain optimistic. No dark age has lasted forever and I'm hopeful that we'll see this one move on as well. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith <mailto:[email protected]> Hudson To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME <mailto:[email protected]> DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2010 3:34 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Trouble, trouble and more trouble Ed, Yes, a good article. My hypothesis, as you know, is that from about the 1980s there were no more uniquely new (mass producible) status goods to motivate the masses. This was the real, underlying reason why credit expanded so enormously at that time. However, whether one believes that my view is correct or not, there still remains the problem that the Western industrial economy seems to have reached structural buffers in employment, as Steven Pearlstein well describes. There are no resource constraints -- so far -- to account for this. Meanwhile, the birth rate of the advanced countries is declining fast. Even if an amazing new technology with a full-employment structure were to be presented to us right now, we (parents or governments) couldn't afford to educate our children to the higher standards that would be required. The only solution I can think of -- and it's one I don't like -- is that the 20% or so of the population who are still thriving in today's (and tomorrow's) recession, and can afford to educate their children in the best schools and universities, will have more children in the coming years and reverse the negative replacement trend. There is anecdotal evidence (enough to convince me) that this trend is already starting. (It's in the category of being fashionable at present.) But there is no hard evidence as yet that this is a real trend. Keith At 15:12 08/09/2010 -0400, you wrote: >From the Washington Post Ed _____ The bleak truth about unemployment By <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/steven+pearlstein/> Steven Pearlstein Tuesday, September 7, 2010; 9:04 PM Somewhere between the rantings of the Republican right, which is peddling the nonsense that excessive government spending is to blame for high unemployment, and the Democratic left, which clings to the false hope that another helping of fiscal stimulus is all that is needed to get millions of Americans permanently back to work, is this stubborn reality: Snip, snip, snip In this election season, the politicians who are really serious about creating jobs and bringing down <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR201009030 1979.html> unemployment won't be the ones screaming about tax cuts, or stimulus or some imagined government takeover of the economy. They'll be the ones talking about how to make the American economy competitive again. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England _____ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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