Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 18 2019, @11:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the Wait-long-enough-and-sc-fi-always-becomes-sci-fact dept.

In 1951 Isaac Asimov inflicted psychohistory on the world with the Foundation Trilogy. Now, thanks to data sets going back more than 2,500 years, scientists have discovered the rules underlying the rise and fall of civilizations, after examining more than 400 such historical societies crash and burn - or in some cases avoid crashing. More here:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/12/history-as-a-giant-data-set-how-analysing-the-past-could-help-save-the-future

Turchin's approach to history, which uses software to find patterns in massive amounts of historical data, has only become possible recently, thanks to the growth in cheap computing power and the development of large historical datasets. This "big data" approach is now becoming increasingly popular in historical disciplines. Tim Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University, believes we are living through "the glory days" of his field, because scholars can pool their research findings with unprecedented ease and extract real knowledge from them. In the future, Turchin believes, historical theories will be tested against large databases, and the ones that do not fit – many of them long-cherished – will be discarded. Our understanding of the past will converge on something approaching an objective truth.

Discuss. Or throw rocks.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday November 18 2019, @01:14PM (37 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Monday November 18 2019, @01:14PM (#921482) Homepage Journal

    Let's assume that this technique can and does work. The problem will become the old classic: "Garbage in, garbage out".

    Which inputs do you provide. It's well known that the winners write the history books. Plus, in our own time, you can see how those history books have changed. If I go back to my primary school days, for example, blacks in the US were described very differently than they are today. The same historical events, described by books written 50 years apart - you would barely know that they are the same events. So which version do you feed to your algorithms?

    Or consider socialism/communism: If you go far enough that you remove the individual incentive to work for your own betterment, these do not work. Attempts to force them to work seem to require exterminating large numbers of your own citizens, "Pour Encourager Les Autres". Yet people like Bernie Sanders aren't dumb - apparently they have a different set of input data that convinces them otherwise - and that they would use as input.

    tl;dr: How can we objectively evaluate history, if we cannot agree on what actually happened in history?

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @01:17PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @01:17PM (#921484)

    Blacks are the superior race. That's why you pay taxes to pay your Black masters not to work.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @06:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @06:28PM (#921611)

      The khazar jewish rats enslaved the Africans. Most slave traders were jews and still are slave owners.

      African culture was manipulated and Christianity was forced upon them in order to control them. Drugs were thrown at them while denying them basic human rights. It is a khazar jew problem and it can be solved by throwing them all into the sea.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday November 18 2019, @01:40PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday November 18 2019, @01:40PM (#921491) Journal

    You have basically restated the age-old problem that makes the soft sciences soft.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 18 2019, @03:31PM (9 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 18 2019, @03:31PM (#921527)

    This is what I love about "discussions" with amateur historians. They "know" with certainty what happened 2-3-4000+ years ago, not just for the tiny point observations that have been preserved through writing or other archaeological evidence, but also for the "common man" of the period. They read it in a book (or worse) somewhere and now it's knowledge.

    Drop in to a thriving civilization on another world, encased in a lead box except for a 2 second flash of an observation where you might be able to reach out and grab an artifact. What do you now "know" about this civilization? You can infer, and imagine, and speculate a lot - it's a near infinite leap forward from the "faint oxygen and combusted hydrocarbon signature" the telescopes picked up from 2 light years out, but do you really think you "know" anything at all about the underlying causes/reasons for their future success or failure? Even if you can take a thousand such snapshots, you still don't know enough to say much - definitively. And, you're getting current information, not something distorted by being buried dirt for ages.

    I made a case for "big" data recently, size matters more than technique - but low quality data reduces the effectiveness tremendously, and when your signal to noise ratio exceeds 1:1 I would agree with Shannon, nothing meaningful or definitive can be recovered from that, you are as likely to reach an erroneous conclusion as a correct one.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 18 2019, @05:30PM (8 children)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 18 2019, @05:30PM (#921594) Journal

      There's also the problem that what is popular and what is accurate are frequently quite different. So the records that *are* preserved aren't accurate reflections of their societies. It's not just that they're an incomplete image, it's that the image presented has been distorted to reflect the taste expected of the audience. Look at what happened to Phrynichus after his tragedy of Miletos. And what happened to Greek literature afterwards.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 18 2019, @06:29PM (7 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 18 2019, @06:29PM (#921612)

        The winners write the history, the literate write the history, the idle rich write a whole lot more history than the working poor, and on and on... it's beyond rose tinted glasses, history is a story told by those lucky enough to tell it. Even the cave painters were tremendously privileged and/or lucky for their time, having both access to a secure cave and the leisure time to practice the visual arts - they may well have been in the most fortunate 1% of their generation. Maybe, just maybe, the last 20 years have enabled a broad and somewhat unbiased look into the lives of the middle quartiles of the population, before that the only people who told and recorded the stories of the poor and downtrodden were not themselves poor and downtrodden.

        And what do the lower class have to say? Well, having about 10,000x less practice at expressing their thoughts for posterity than previous archival scholars, you get YouTube comments, 4chan, etc. which is really hard to interpret, especially for scholars used to interpreting the surviving Greek literature.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @07:02PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @07:02PM (#921631)

          mostly agree. but there are also many "cave paintings" in modern prison ... and lots of idyl times.
          archeology is history without books?

          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 18 2019, @10:04PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 18 2019, @10:04PM (#921706)

            there are also many "cave paintings" in modern prison ... and lots of idyl times.

            In many ways, modern prisoners are both more comfortable and powerful than Kings of ancient times, to say nothing of neolithic man - they may not (or in rare cases may) command armies, but they have superior medical care, more reliably safe and nutritious food, up to the minute information from around the globe, the (intermittent) ability to communicate globally instantly, relative safety, and... lots of time on their hands.

            archeology is history without books?

            In a way, it's also a study of the random - things that were usually accidentally preserved, although the great Kings and wealthy did often leave more enduring archaeological artifacts than the common man, whether written or not.

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 18 2019, @08:50PM (4 children)

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday November 18 2019, @08:50PM (#921674) Journal

          Addressing that flaw was supposed to be the goal of sub-altern studies, ie. to tell the story of history's losers from the losers' point of view. Unfortunately it seems sometime in the last 20 years it got hijacked by identity politics and had all the explanatory potential sucked right out of it.

          A mentor of mine, Prasenjit Duara, advocated an approach he called "bifurcated history" that enjoins historians to tell history as a branching narrative rather than the linear teleos. It seemed to me like it would multiply the corpus the historian would have to ingest before putting pen to paper, but maybe it's worth the extra effort.

          I seriously doubt the guys in TFA are going to be able to swing that, though, because one of the things a deep read of history teaches is that the meaning of words and slogans, etc. is one of the most contested areas that drives social evolution; that rather bedevils keyword analysis.

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 18 2019, @10:28PM (3 children)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 18 2019, @10:28PM (#921713)

            I seriously doubt the guys in TFA are going to be able to swing that

            I seriously doubt that anyone is going to extract sufficient signal from the noise to get anything even remotely predictive of the future beyond next year. There might be enough "high quality" data flowing around from the last 20 years to model up some short term predictions of how things are going to go based on how they have gone, maybe, some of the time.

            What I am sure of is that the guys in TFA, and others like them, can seek, find, and secure funding to do their research, generate their (meaningless) results which will then be used as supporting fodder for various policy change propositions by those who fund the research.

            Re: interpreting the data, that brings to mind the ounce of gold I bought when I was 10 years old. Back then, Walter Cronkite (or whoever) announced the price of gold every night on the 6pm news, and... curious about it I asked my parents and they explained, and I figured out that I could make better than bank interest if I "timed the market," bought low, sold high, the pattern was pretty clear, I was pretty sure I could do it, so I took my life savings to the coin store and bought a 1 oz Krugerand, successfully near a low point. I watched the news every night, I tracked the price fluctuations up and down, I finally hit 2x bank rate ROI and I went to the coin store to sell my gold and reap my reward, and I learned about commission - seems that they sell you the gold for the price on TV, but they wanted something like a 5% commission when they bought it - mom and dad never warned me (I think honestly didn't know) about that... I went away sad, but tracked for a few months more, followed the patterns, predicted a peak, went, sold, VICTORY! Something like a 9% APR profit even after commissions when the savings account available to me only paid 5% APR. The next night I was vindicated, the price fell just like I predicted - based on my then 300 price data points and limited input from the nightly news I had successfully timed and beaten the market, financial pattern wizard - and it stayed down for almost a week. 6 days after I sold, Iran took the hostages and within 2 more weeks gold had quadrupled in price. Unprecedented event, outside the modeler's input experience, no prior warnings (that I had access to, at least), and, boom, my hard won, and significant 0.09 over 0.05 APR victory was trivialized by the 4.00x gain in 2 weeks.

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
            • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 19 2019, @06:12PM (2 children)

              by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday November 19 2019, @06:12PM (#922019) Journal

              Thanks for that. It's an apt depiction of market timing. I used to work in mutual funds (Morningstar) and later in hedge funds, and so investment strategies are something we studied keenly. When you look across all of them, from market timers to contrarians and such, over the long term they all underperform the market indices. Sure, they might outperform the indices for a time, but it's always negated with losses over the long run.

              So for the average person who wants to invest his money, the easiest strategy is also about the best one.

              The only other approach to investing I put any stock in is Warren Buffett's, who plays long-term trends in the fundamentals.

              Everyone else who promises or gets short term gains is running a cheat or a scam, or simply gets goddamn lucky. Every time. Either it's insider trading, front-running trades, or a ponzi scheme (see Bernie Madoff). And for every one who scores as an early round investor in Google, there are thousands of VCs or angel investors who lose their shirts. They should know it's stupid, dumb luck, but it never seems to dampen their triumphalism.

              --
              Washington DC delenda est.
              • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 19 2019, @06:44PM (1 child)

                by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday November 19 2019, @06:44PM (#922028)

                The VCs (at least Credit Suisse First Boston) know damn well what they are getting into - around 1999 they were dropping 5-10 million per bet on startups, and expecting 16/20 of those startups to be bankrupt within a year, hoping 1/20 would break out and make back their losses on the 16, and also expecting about 3/20 to sort of struggle along sideways with no real chance for breakout success - you can't tell which bin a particular business plan is going to fall into until after you've given them the $5-10M and 6 months to a year to see how they are trending.

                We were only looking for $2M, but I think we ended up taking 3 initially, and more later. We had private investment of about $1.9M, and a fair track record, with some potential for .com breakout action. Years later, it became evident that we were in the struggle along with no potential for breakout bin. Of course, one way CSFB maximizes their ROI is by: A) demanding control of the company they invest in, B) demanding incorporation in Delaware - the most investor friendly laws possibly in the world, certainly in the developed world and C) when those 3 companies go sideways, through your control of the board force them to take on debt (which has priority over equity) debt held by none other than CSFB, then: D) when the market takes a little dip have an audit performed which deems the net valuation of the company to be worth less than the company's debt... finally, again through control of the board E - for Exit) restructure, and buy out any outside investors for "their share" of equity.

                I think it was 2007 when I got a check for a penny (stock issued as partial compensation for employment...) Our private angel who put in over $1M of personal money got a check for a penny. A dozen other private investors with anywhere from $10K to over $200K of personal money invested each got a check for a penny. CSFB retained control and later liquidated the company for quite a bit more than the value of their debt - market fluctuations, you know.

                --
                🌻🌻 [google.com]
                • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 20 2019, @01:57AM

                  by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday November 20 2019, @01:57AM (#922201) Journal

                  I think it was 2007 when I got a check for a penny (stock issued as partial compensation for employment...) Our private angel who put in over $1M of personal money got a check for a penny. A dozen other private investors with anywhere from $10K to over $200K of personal money invested each got a check for a penny. CSFB retained control and later liquidated the company for quite a bit more than the value of their debt - market fluctuations, you know.

                  Damn, that sucks. You have my sympathy.

                  --
                  Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday November 18 2019, @05:06PM (6 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday November 18 2019, @05:06PM (#921576) Journal
    If you had actually read the article, you would know that they didn't use history books, but actual data - parish church records of births, marriages, deaths, tax levies, etc.
    --
    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 18 2019, @05:34PM (5 children)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 18 2019, @05:34PM (#921596) Journal

      And consider how limited THAT data is. And incomplete. It's also quite limited in the kind of data it preserves.

      The records you mention are part of history. One accurate in different ways than historical ballads, and accurate with different sources of error. E.g., how many people did what to avoid excessive taxation?

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Monday November 18 2019, @07:24PM (4 children)

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday November 18 2019, @07:24PM (#921635) Journal
        All data will always be incomplete, no matter what field you're operating in. That's no excuse - that's "whataboutism",and not a valid argument. We can and do operate on incomplete information all the time , even in our personal and work lives. Does this prevent you from getting out of bed in the morning? Do you refuse to make decisions because you don't have complete information?

        T We have sufficient information to validate the theory, tested against the rise of over 450 civilizations, their reactions to internal and external stressors, and declines. We don't need complete information to realize that the current rise in inequality mimics the rise in inequality of civilizations that fail - all it takes is one extra stressor to set off the majority against the ruling elites. Bread and circuses didn't work for the Roman Empire, and UBI won't work in today's societies.

        People need a purpose, a feeling that they are performing meaningful work , and that they have value. They also need to feel that they have some control of their destiny. The rise in inequality, and the loss of any sort of security in the gig economy, as well as UBI, is an explosive mix.

        --
        SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 18 2019, @09:11PM

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday November 18 2019, @09:11PM (#921680) Journal

          What is true, though, is that trying to subject those historical documents to machine analysis is fraught, to say the least. We don't have to go back very far at all to see how loosey-goosey our forebears were with spelling. Sometimes they'd spell "old" as "old," and others "olde." That right there is going to throw off your algorithm. Then there are the changing meanings of words that were spelled the same. Or you have contemporaries who use the same words to mean different things; the ability of information to be transmitted widely with high fidelity from one part of a region or society to another faced stark limits, such that the reality of phrases and slogans and standardization of language in pre-modernity resembled a game of telephone, writ large. All of that defeats machine analysis.

          To put a finer point on it, a buddy of mine is a philologist of Ancient Near Eastern Studies. The poor son of a bitch has to pore through piles of cuneiform fragments written in Avestan, Ancient High Persian, Sanskrit, and about 7 other dead languages in the course of his work on morphology. I once suggested OCR plus pattern recognition to help him in his work and he laughed for five minutes. Just handwriting differences of one scribe to another are enough to throw off such a thing, because there was no standard font for anything.

          You would literally have to read every historical document first, codify it all with a standard key, devise special cases to capture what pops out of that standard key, and then maybe you could have a computer look at it. But I bet you even then it will get it wrong.

          Hell, just look at economics. They get it flat wrong all the time when trying to predict the future from past data, and all they have to deal with is actual numbers.

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 18 2019, @11:05PM (2 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 18 2019, @11:05PM (#921730)

          We can and do operate on incomplete information all the time

          We have no other choice. You do notice the ubiquity of sayings like "the best laid plans of mice and men," "life is what happens when you are busy making other plans," "The Capriciousness of Fate," etc.

          We have sufficient information to validate the theory, tested against the rise of over 450 civilizations

          Do we, really? Of those 450 civilizations, how many do we even know, really know - not just an "educated" (educated how? based on what?) guess the most basic economics like average hours per day worked by the common laborer? Relative robustness and health of the common worker? Were they able to productively work the farms 200 days a year, or were they laid up with debilitating weakness from parasites and infections 200 days a year? How do you come by this information for even 50 of those 450 civilizations, and what are the chances that your input data is even within a factor of 2 of what really happened?

          We don't need complete information to realize that the current rise in inequality mimics the rise in inequality of civilizations that fail - all it takes is one extra stressor to set off the majority against the ruling elites.

          Correlation is not causation, yadda, yadda...

          Bread and circuses didn't work for the Roman Empire, and UBI won't work in today's societies.

          That's quite an assertion. How strong is your ancestral Puritan work ethic? Any potential bias bleeding in from there?

          People need a purpose, a feeling that they are performing meaningful work, and that they have value.

          Absolutely. I have worked, in limited capacity, with the disabled who are existing on SSI - functionally similar to UBI for them, but with some key shortcomings. They do indeed suffer depression, horrible self esteem, and poor health as a result of not having a feeling of purpose. Volunteerism can help a little, but paid work is a much stronger medicine for them, and that's a major failing of the SSI system because it strongly dis-incentivizes them from seeking paid work due to the bureaucratic nightmare that ensues when they start receiving a little income. The group I worked with tries, hard, to get these people working - for at least some kind of pay, and that component of being paid for their labor makes all the difference in their quality of life, and health.

          Some preliminary UBI study results have shown a dramatic increase in happiness, security, sense of well being, etc. among those who do not have to fear for losing their food and shelter while they pursue something that is meaningful to them.

          They also need to feel that they have some control of their destiny. The rise in inequality, and the loss of any sort of security in the gig economy, as well as UBI, is an explosive mix.

          UBI is a strong positive for that feeling of control of one's destiny. Far from bread lines and occasional circuses, UBI is freedom from fear and a marked increase in security. If the working world doesn't need all the people, then some subset can turn on the Netflix and Playstation, tune in to whatever wastes of time engage them, and drop out until they're ready to engage. If UBI only provides enough for rent in a windowless basement, rice and beans for food, and basic connectivity for continuing education (strong subsidy candidate there) and entertainment... let the hobbyists grow weed in the sunlight of their one window if that's their passion, once it is legalized for a few years it won't be nearly as compelling as it is today. And, when they grow tired of their low impact lifestyle and want to engage with the world that they see on their screens, they have the option to up their game and do that - prove themselves worthy and compete for real jobs in the real world with real income that can fund travel, meals prepared by others, fancy toys and fancier living accommodations.

          It is my strong feeling that, instead of employing legions of Wal-Mart greeters, Fast Food slingers, warehouse and delivery personnel, etc. we would be better off, as a society, to let people off the grinding treadmill where they spend decades getting nowhere, and instead give them the option to pursue education, or entertainment, or any number of other low impact lifestyles without the fear of total homelessness, starvation, or vexatious tribulations from the social benefits inquisition.

          Then I have to say something unpopular about birth control, but that needs to happen regardless of whatever else the future holds. Prosperity is not the answer to out of control population growth, that is a myth perpetuated in large part by those whose fortunes are dependent upon positive population growth.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:04AM (1 child)

            by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:04AM (#921757) Journal
            The Puritans didn't exist in Roman times. Just saying. As for UBI, one of the first experiments was done in Canada, the improvement in quality of life, the ability to get more education, etc, is well documented. However, extra education isn't the problem when economies have jobless recoveries, and that is the future. The benefits of increased productivity need to be shared with workers - and if workers had been paid via increased productivity over the last 50 years, the minimum wage would be close to $50/hour, or a 10-hour work week at current wages. Both would solve the jobs shortage that leads to UBI being perceived as a solution.

            As I've pointed out elsewhere, and as the theory points out when checked against data for the last 2500 years, excessive population increases drive economic disparity, resulting in boom/bust cycles as more wealth gets concentrated into fewer hands. Societies that don't have an active safety net are going to be in trouble, same as every other society that imploded. The USA is well along the road, with wealth concentration that makes the gilded age look like underachieving pikers. Climate change will be the spark that sets everything to maximum instability, and the USA will probably fail to make the necessary changes voluntarily because "communism ". A revolution is probably what's needed to drain the swamp. Elect Trump again and it will probably happen. Maybe it's for the best, long term. I don't know.

            --
            SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 19 2019, @02:43AM

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday November 19 2019, @02:43AM (#921808)

              Pardon the rant, but the Puritans were an outcast sect who voluntarily emigrated (as opposed to the Aussies who involuntarily emigrated), and through a random stroke of luck ended up in the most developed country least destroyed by World War II. Even though they abhor seeing others "not work hard" they still can't manage to muster fiscal responsibility, and the lazy slobs they left behind in Europe not only rebuilt from the rubble of WWII, but are also managing universal healthcare and state paid higher education while they cannot, or will not. Just saying.

              Lack of education isn't holding back economic productivity, but as far as the environment is concerned economic productivity is a major part of the problem. If 2/3 of the population would sit on the couch smoking weed and watching Netflix all day instead of working two part time jobs just to be able to afford a car to drive between them, it leave a much smaller dent in the environment. Indeed the benefits of increased productivity need to be shared better, but we're a long way from convincing the voting public that that's even remotely possible. I really like the idea of a reduced work week and increased vacation time (yet another thing those lazy slobs in Europe have been doing for decades, while still affording their socialist agendas), though anything below about 20 hours a week makes social cohesion at the workplace challenging, at least by today's standards.

              I'm not perceiving UBI as a solution so much as a social contract / safety net - a guarantee that: as a citizen, you will be provided for to this minimum level, no matter what. Like the Danish who are guaranteed 500 heated square feet and a television, or whatever it is these days, knowing that you'll always have at least enough to eat and pay for some kind of basic shelter is infinitely better than the threat of living 15 hours a week at the Social Security Office just to ensure you don't starve to death, and still having to deal with intermittent homelessness in the meantime. I actually also see it as an answer to illegal immigrants. You want to come here? You want to "take our jobs" - by all means, come, work hard, be productive, we all know that your labor benefits your (taxpaying citizen) employer more than it benefits you, we'll educate your children, we'll even provide basic healthcare, but... you're going to be competing with citizens who have the safety net of UBI, who get that UBI while they are working and you do not, and you're going to be buying goods, services, rent, etc. in an economy based on citizens who get that UBI, so... it's probably going to be not very economically attractive for illegals to come here anymore.

              excessive population increases drive economic disparity

              Is that causation established, or just correlation observed?

              boom/bust cycles as more wealth gets concentrated into fewer hands

              Boomers are passing 70 years on this cycle, despite all the hue and cry over the great economic collapse of 2008, that was a tepid soft contraction as compared to the crash of 1929 through World War II.

              Societies that don't have an active safety net are going to be in trouble

              Ergo: UBI

              Climate change will be the spark that sets everything to maximum instability,

              Spark? How about the horde of virtually immortal 800 lb gorillas inexorably destroying the coastal cities and otherwise wreaking havoc on inland weather, biodiversity, basic agriculture, and other very significant challenges we haven't even identified yet?

              and the USA will probably fail to make the necessary changes voluntarily because "communism ".

              I think it's more because God has always told us what to do and we must follow His will, particularly when telling other people how to live their lives. Work Hard, Don't have Sex before Marriage (which is Only a Holy Union of One Man and One Woman), Respect Authority, Punish the Guilty - and if you can't find the truly Guilty make sure that someone who seems like they deserve it suffers retribution when something bad has happened to "one of Our people." It's all the more insidious because the people who shout the loudest for these rules and punishments have secretly broken most, if not all of them, and are usually continuing to dig deeper for ever more depravity in their own private/secret lives. They beg forgiveness when exposed, but offer no clemency when others are. There's no reasoning with people who have such disconnect between what they practice in their own lives and what they preach as "the Way." This is the country that looks set to finally approve a Constitutional Amendment acknowledging that Women have equal rights to Men, fully 98 years after it was first presented to Congress as a followup to Women's right to vote.

              A revolution is probably what's needed to drain the swamp.

              There are all kinds of revolutions, I do hope we can effective positive change without declaration of Martial Law or abandonment of the Constitution. For all my complaints, I really do believe we have made tremendous positive progress since 1776.

              Elect Trump again and it will probably happen.

              I hope that 4 years of Trump is enough for a true wakeup call in 2020, but it's hard to know. Poll numbers like "70% disapproval ratings" have little correlation to the figures that come out of our electoral system. Been "hoping for change" since 2008, but precious little has really happened. Got a rude wakeup call in 2009 when I complained to the ACLU about disabled children being told to enter the school grounds through a hole in the back fence, dropped off and picked up on a dirt/mud traffic circle and spending their entire day in temporary portable classrooms. Seems that the Federal standards of inclusion, even after the Obama "get serious" changes amount to: if at least some disabled children are served in the main building (1 class out of 12, check.) and some non-disabled children are served in the temporary facilities (1 class out of 60, check.) then that is sufficient integration that the Feds will not investigate, and the local schoolboard, headed by the town's KKK Grand Wizard, knows these rules all too well.

              Maybe it's for the best, long term. I don't know.

              No way to know. What I do know is: as dire as things look today, in many ways they looked worse in 1965 when my parents met, and as dire as they looked then, they looked worse in 1942 when their parents met. Even though we did our best to keep calm and carry on, the threat of massive global devastation was even more dire in 1988 than it is today. We seem to be in less control now than we were in those crises, but, actually the control of today's major problems are more democratic than it was back then - more in everybody's hands than just the hands of a few leaders. That could be the worst aspect of today's crises, or it might surprisingly turn out to be the best. No way to know until the show plays out.

              --
              🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday November 18 2019, @05:25PM (14 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Monday November 18 2019, @05:25PM (#921592) Journal

    Or consider socialism/communism: If you go far enough that you remove the individual incentive to work for your own betterment,

    And, of course, if you don't go far enough you also remove that incentive or channel it into criminal activity. There exists a sweet zone.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Monday November 18 2019, @07:46PM (13 children)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday November 18 2019, @07:46PM (#921643) Journal
      Socialism doesn't remove the incentives to work, except for those who would be lazy bums in any society. We have plenty of socialist countries where people absolutely want to work. Canada, Germany. The UK. Ireland. Italy. Etc, etc.

      People have an innate need to feel control over their lives, and work is one such way. You work, you contribute to society, you contribute to your own self-worth and economic well-being.

      Why do you think retired people volunteer so much? They've got their pension, they don't get paid to volunteer. And yet they volunteer, working for free, because of the social benefits to themselves and society in general. You are working with likeminded people, there's no competition to see who makes more money, ... imagine how much more enjoyable regular work would be under those conditions. Where you do the tasks you want to do and are able to do. People pitch in to do the hard stuff, supported by the other volunteers who appreciate and acknowledge the extra effort. And you put in the time you can, when you can, because you want to, not because you have to.

      Volunteer workers are an example of socialist organizations that work. Without them, capitalism would fall apart much quicker because there's no economic profit in voluntary work, and yet it provides essential services, from disaster relief to helping the poor and infirm, and others who are being harmed by the precarious, rent-seeking economy.

      Want a society that doesn't have volunteers who step in for floods, fire, and other disaster relief? That leaves even more people homeless or having to choose whether to buy food or medication, but not both? Want more people sleeping in the streets, shitting in the streets, like in New Delhi and Mumbai and St. Petersburg?

      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday November 18 2019, @08:42PM

        by sjames (2882) on Monday November 18 2019, @08:42PM (#921673) Journal

        You're preaching to the choir! All of those countries you mentioned are at least a lot closer to the sweet spot than the Ŭ.S.

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 18 2019, @09:21PM (11 children)

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday November 18 2019, @09:21PM (#921683) Journal

        Socialism doesn't remove the incentives to work

        Yes, it absolutely does, because it de-couples work from reward. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is the famous Marxist dictum that captures its misunderstanding in a nutshell.

        If you think somebody is going to randomly volunteer to go out in the middle of the night in dirty weather to repair a broken sewer main out of the goodness of his heart, then you are a fantasist.

        Laissez-faire capitalism needs to have its sharp edges abraided, but socialism goes full-retard in the other direction.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by dry on Monday November 18 2019, @10:49PM (2 children)

          by dry (223) on Monday November 18 2019, @10:49PM (#921724) Journal

          When you feel that you own part of that sewer system, you are likely to go out and fix it in the middle of the night.

          • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 19 2019, @06:00PM (1 child)

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday November 19 2019, @06:00PM (#922017) Journal

            No, amigo, what you get is the same old Free Rider Problem. This has been gamed out for decades. It doesn't work.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.
            • (Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday November 19 2019, @10:25PM

              by dry (223) on Tuesday November 19 2019, @10:25PM (#922120) Journal

              I guess volunteer fire departments don't go out in the night to fight fires. It's not like they're getting paid and being part of the community is awfully close to communism, just like all the other volunteer things that get done in my community.

        • (Score: 2) by lentilla on Monday November 18 2019, @11:40PM (1 child)

          by lentilla (1770) on Monday November 18 2019, @11:40PM (#921746)

          If you think somebody is going to randomly volunteer to go out in the middle of the night in dirty weather to repair a broken sewer main out of the goodness of his heart, then you are a fantasist.

          I would repair a broken sewer in filthy weather if it really needed to be done - I just wouldn't do it on a regular basis. Socialist systems have this covered: when something needs to be done on a regular basis, an expert is tasked with doing the job. The community recognises the need for the job to be done and bands together to pay the person doing the job.

          • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 19 2019, @05:51PM

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday November 19 2019, @05:51PM (#922014) Journal

            I would repair a broken sewer in filthy weather if it really needed to be done

            You might if it's yours. What if it's two hours' drive away in Queens, where only brutes and Philistines live? I'm guessing you'd opt to stay home in bed with your snookums 100% of the time.

            when something needs to be done on a regular basis, an expert is tasked with doing the job. The community recognises the need for the job to be done and bands together to pay the person doing the job.

            You mean like happens in our lovely democracies where the KGB doesn't also show up and abduct my spouse in the middle of the night? Yeah, I think we have that covered; also, the people who get paid to fix our systems get pensions & benefits too. Yep, no need for socialism here, but thanks.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday November 18 2019, @11:42PM

          by Immerman (3985) on Monday November 18 2019, @11:42PM (#921748)

          You are absolutely correct that "to each..." seems to remove the economic incentives to strive. There are other kinds of incentives but I won't argue that point, I have a feeling that, on the balance, you're correct, and society needs those material incentives to prosper.

          But what you are imagining is communism, not socialism.

          And since I suddenly saw your quote in a different light that's more interesting than what I was going to write about, let me offer a different take than yours (which may well have little to do with what Marx meant)
          Take it the two partial statements as a skeleton:

          From each according to their ability could be expressed as - "the system" should extract as much out of each individual as their reasonable amount of their effort can deliver
          to each according to their need - nobody should ever need anything that "the system" can deliver.

          Now, let me describe a system where the "To..." is true. Nobody *needs* anything - you have free access to medical care, simple robes, clean water, a 3'x7' sleeping cubicle, and all the nutritious ration-bars you can choke down. You can spend your days wandering the world in a health, comfort, and safety that our stone-age ancestors could only dream of. You need for nothing, but there's certainly a huge amount of room for improvement.

          Now, myself? I think that world leaves a whole lot of room for economic incentives to secure the "From" part of the equation. Especially with automation rapidly reducing just how much "from" is really needed to deliver the "to".

          Add in free education, transportation, and basic banking, so that those lacks don't hinder people from effectively working to better themselves and their position, and you've got a society in which any peasant with the potential and ambition can pursue whatever career path they wish, limited only by their own efforts and the competition. Without being chained back by the need to work 40+ hours a week just to keep themselves alive.

          You also eliminate the element of coercion from employment negotiations. Without the fear of death or homelessness to motivate them, workers at the bottom of the ladder are free to pass up on any opportunity they don't deem equitable. I'm willing to bet that causes a substantial increase in the combination of money and respect paid to them for their services, with likely trickle-up effects for everybody above them on the ladder.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:15AM (4 children)

          by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:15AM (#921761) Journal
          Communism isn't socialism, get over your ignorance. Canada is a socialist country - public Medicare for all citizens, no copay or deductibles. Quebec has a public pharmacare program for anyone who doesn't have private drug coverage. Other provinces have some more limited version. That doesn't make Canada communist. People still like the idea of working to buy things.

          People also still own private property, and are free to start businesses and own the means of production in Canada, so another difference between socialism and communism.

          But just look at health care in the USA. Spending more per capital for worse health care outcomes, and medical bills are STILL the #1 cause of bankruptcy. Crazy.

          --
          SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
          • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 19 2019, @05:46PM (3 children)

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday November 19 2019, @05:46PM (#922012) Journal

            Communism isn't socialism, get over your ignorance. Canada is a socialist country

            First, I know that communism isn't socialism. Socialism, per Marx, you know, the guy that invented that term?, is the stage between capitalism and communism where the state controls the means of production in order to unwind the social patterns and assumptions of the proletariat that have been oppressed and conditioned to oppression under capitalism. Communism is the utopian end state whereby the state becomes no longer necessary in the means of production because a new communist man has been created. There has never been a communist state on Earth because the whole party stops at socialism, which oppresses and murders millions of people.

            Also, Canada is not a socialist country, by definition. The state does not control the means of production. Private property is the rule. What it does have is certain social programs that benefit people who can't pay for them on their own. So, you might want to check your own level of relative knowledge and ignorance, compadre.

            My personal take on healthcare, since you raised it, is that we ought to regard it as infrastructure more than a luxury. We don't generally charge people to walk down the sidewalk or drive on a given road or use the sewers to dispose of excrement because the knock-on benefits of having them free to use is far greater than a narrow, per-use fee assessment can deliver. In other words, our need to rely upon each other forms many of the underpinnings of human society, and if we want to pursue an extreme capitalist ideology in a niggardly pursuit of profit maximization then we will find ourselves in a reality as vicious and murderous as a socialist society delivers.

            Our best chance for freedom, prosperity, and progress lies in the interstices of tensions between all the parties that think they know exactly what's best for us.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.
            • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:28PM (1 child)

              by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:28PM (#922493) Journal
              You obviously don't know what socialism is. Marx wouldn't recognize socialist governments if they beat him with a stick. You keep mistaking ownership of the means of production as a defining characteristic , which is bullshit. Marx is no more relevant to modern discussions of socialism than Einstein's refusal to accept spooky action at a distance or "god does not play dice with the universe " is to modern physics.
              --
              SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
              • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday November 21 2019, @12:22AM

                by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday November 21 2019, @12:22AM (#922732) Journal

                What? Look, comrade, if you don't even understand that the material dialectic is the entire, I mean, the complete, central dynamic of Marxist theory and its government forms of socialism and communism, then you need to be sent back to the camps for re-education.

                --
                Washington DC delenda est.
            • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday November 20 2019, @07:27PM

              by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday November 20 2019, @07:27PM (#922554) Journal

              We don't generally charge people to walk down the sidewalk or drive on a given road or use the sewers to dispose of excremen

              Sure we do. Municipal taxes. Road taxes on gas and diesel. Special levies for local improvements. Water taxes, taxes to pay for redevelopment, public transit (which also gets users to pay a portion), state and federal taxes, taxes to work (payments into unemployment and pension funds, taxes on earnings), estate taxes when you die, sin taxes, amusement taxes, access taxes on telecommunications services (talk might be cheap but it isn't free), half the economy is sustained by taxes.

              --
              SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19 2019, @05:25AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19 2019, @05:25AM (#921850)

    I partly blame copy protection laws for allowing this. If it weren't for such ridiculous copy protection extensions it would be easier for you to reference these history books and for us to make comparisons between prior books and current ones as these older books would be in the public domain and we can archive them online and make them freely searchable. Copy protection laws have helped distort our history and is similar to book burning. Maybe that's an intended effect, to make it easier for the future government to rewrite history and get away with it. It also makes it easier to hide older scientific research making it easier to sustain a given position even though those that held such a position made incorrect predictions in the past since it's harder for us to have access to older information and publications.

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:32PM

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:32PM (#922496) Journal
      History books weren't used as sources of record for these studies. So copyright is irrelevant.

      Besides, you cannot copyright facts. Can't patent them either. Facts are non-creative, and not protected by either copyright or patent. So feel free to use the population data in copyright works to your hearts content.

      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.