pdfernhout

I'm hoping that someday more people will appreciate the humor in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Until then, there is always "The Optimism of Uncertainty" by Howard Zinn: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/optimism-uncertai...

    "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

    I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

    There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

    What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. ..."

A deeper issue from the post-war era and science according to Dr. David Goostein, then vice-provost of Caltech from 1994: https://web.archive.org/web/20240213233731/https://www.its.c...

    "The crises that face science [from the ending of exponential growth in science funding after the Cold War period] are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.

    The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.

    Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
  
    Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. 

    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past. ..."

Inefficiency all too often is celebrated by our society, as I wrote in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "Also, many current industries that employ large numbers of people (ranging from the health insurance industry, the compulsory schooling industry, the defense industry, the fossil fuel industry, conventional agriculture industry, the software industry, the newspaper and media industries, and some consumer products industries) are coming under pressure from various movements from both the left and the right of the political spectrum in ways that might reduce the need for much paid work in various ways. Such changes might either directly eliminate jobs or, by increasing jobs temporarily eliminate subsequent problems in other areas and the jobs that go with them (as reflected in projections of overall cost savings by such transitions); for example building new wind farms instead of new coal plants might reduce medical expenses from asthma or from mercury poisoning. A single-payer health care movement, a homeschooling and alternative education movement, a global peace movement, a renewable energy movement, an organic agriculture movement, a free software movement, a peer-to-peer movement, a small government movement, an environmental movement, and a voluntary simplicity movement, taken together as a global mindshift of the collective imagination, have the potential to eliminate the need for many millions of paid jobs in the USA while providing enormous direct and indirect cost savings. This would make the unemployment situation much worse than it currently is, while paradoxically possibly improving our society and lowering taxes. Many of the current justifications for continuing social policies that may have problematical effects on the health of society, pose global security risks, or may waste prosperity in various ways is that they create vast numbers of paid jobs as a form of make-work."

"What if the future didn’t end in collapse… but in transformation? 2100 — Beyond the Horizon is a utopian short [ten minute] film presented as a speculative visual timeline, exploring a possible evolution of human civilization from 2026 to 2100. Through advances in science, medicine, energy, space infrastructure, and global cooperation, this film imagines a world where humanity gradually moves beyond scarcity, disease, and planetary limits — toward stability, exploration, and coexistence. This is not a prediction. It is a thought experiment. All scenes were generated using AI and assembled into a cinematic narrative. Any resemblance to real events is coincidental."

Some options for dealing with economic dislocation by AI and robotics that I put together about more than a decade ago (which relate to my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."):

"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics" https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

Beyond not mentioning a Basic Income, one other thing which Bernie Sanders' comments overlook is the potential for transforming needed "work" into "play": "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985 https://web.archive.org/web/20080702023453/http://www.whywor...

Rethinking our fundamental social instutions from an abundance perspective as I did in "Post-Scarcity Princeton" in 2008 is another aspect of all this: https://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

I just reread (via an audiobook) "Voyage From Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan (from 1982) which is all about people brought up in an old way of thinking actively resisting transitioning to an abundance way of thinking (including by preventing other people from doing the same). Artificial scarcity is a powerful drug for the very powerful... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, fascism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict. In an attempt to crush this anarchist adhocracy, the Mayflower II government employs every available method of control; however, in the absence of conditioning the Chironians are not even capable of comprehending the methods, let alone bowing to them. The Chironians simply use methods similar to Gandhi's satyagraha and other forms of nonviolent resistance to win over most of the Mayflower II crew members, who had never previously experienced true freedom, and isolate the die-hard authoritarians."

"The artificial intelligence and robotics being developed by multi-billionaires will allow corporate America to wipe out tens of millions of decent-paying jobs, cut labor costs and boost profits. What happens to working class people who can’t find jobs because they don’t exist?"

Anxiety is not identical to depression, but consider: "The Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression: Where Is It Going?" https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/02/chemical-imbalance-theo... "The spurious chemical imbalance theory of depression is arguably the most destructive thing that psychiatry has ever done. ..."

The placebo effect can be very real...

And self-fulfilling predictions by authority figures can also be powerful...

Lack of neurotransmitters being produced in the gut due to microbiome issues is maybe the closest to a real "imbalance" -- like with the original article. Example: "How Your Gut Health Affects Your Brain: The Mind-Altering Power of Your Microbiome" https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/how-your-gut-health-affects... "Your gut microbes can produce neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), and acetylcholine—all of which are crucial for brain function. In fact, more than 90% of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut, not the brain. This has profound implications for mood and emotional health."

Lots more health and wellness ideas collected by me here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

Good luck finding things that work for you -- assuming you are not happy just the way you are. "I like you just the way you are" - Mr. Rodgers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPDTpqtmzPQ

Indeed; good point! And how will all that play out? Better communications or more schlock to wade through on the internet? Or both?

As a historical analogy, a lot of telephone switchboard operators lost their jobs with the beginning of direct dialing with better telephone switching -- and direct dialing presumably is preferred by most people than having to talk with a person before their calls go through. Although something was also lost in that telephone operators also had a broader informal social role in a community (including as a gossip) and also informally coordinated some emergency services (judging from old-time movies).

Related: https://www.bbntimes.com/society/telephone-operators-the-eli... "As late as 1950, there were about 350,000 women working as switchboard operators working for phone company, and maybe another million working as switchboard operators at offices, factories, hotels, and apartments. Roughly one of every 13 working women was a switchboard operator. Of course, now the number of switchboard operators is nearly zero. The example is often given to point out that in a dynamic economy, even when hundreds of thousands of jobs are “lost,” workers do manage to transition to new jobs. But that basic story lacks detail. James Feigenbaum and Daniel P. Gross have been digging into two aspects: 1) What happened to the women who were displaced from switchboard operator jobs; and 2) for AT&T, what determined the speed and timing of investing in automation to replace switchboard operators? ... The effect of this shock on incumbent operators was to dispossess many of their jobs and careers: telephone operators in cities with cutovers were less likely to be in the same job the next decade we observe them, less likely to be working at all, and conditional on working were more likely to be in lower-paying occupations. In contrast, however, automation did not reduce employment rates in subsequent cohorts of young women, who found work in other sectors—including jobs with similar demographics and wages (such as typists and secretaries), and some with lower wages (such as food service workers)."

So, it sounds like the next generation who pursued different careers did OK even if the displaced generation did worse?

One difference though is that switchboard operator was a relatively recently introduced job in the past century given telephones are a recent invention. People have been writing/thinking, speaking/acting, and painting/drawing/art-ing essentially since there were people (essentially the jobs in the article being replaced).

What I put together circa 2010 is becoming more and more relevant: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

"a friendly and kind guy mostly contented with his life" reminds me somewhat of another Irish author, James P. Hogan (who I was lucky enough to meet in person once through Princeton University's Infinity Limited science fiction society and corresponded a bit with many years later).

https://web.archive.org/web/20160221054919/http://www.jamesp...

https://tangentonline.com/interviews-columnsmenu-166/intervi...

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/articles/ho... "Hogan's humane outlook and faith in intelligent problem-solving permeate his books."

We already have that "defeated underclass" courtesy of a century of mainstream schooling (according to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto): "The Underground History of American Education -- A conspiracy against ourselves" https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/10/john-taylor-gatto/the-cu... "As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates — these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched. I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises — no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system...."

In 2010, I put together a list of alternatives here to address the rise of AI and Robotics and its effect on jobs: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Retrotopia by John Michael Greer has an aspect similar to different technology levels. Except that in the novel they are essentially taxation zones relating to infrastructure. If you want to live in a zone with, say, publicly maintained roads, then you have to pay taxes for it. Otherwise you could live in a zone without them. Same for other public amenities. More details here: https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/01/01/retrotopia-john-michae... "To maintain autarky, and for practical and philosophical reasons we will turn to in a minute, Lakeland rejects public funding of any technology past 1940, and imposes cultural strictures discouraging much private use of such technology. Even 1940s technology is not necessarily the standard; each county chooses to implement public infrastructure in one of five technological tiers, going back to 1820. The more retro, the lower the taxes. Family farming is apparently the main activity for the population, usually with horses and oxen (petroleum is nearly non-existent and the few motor vehicles run on heavily-taxed biodiesel). Towns and cities have been rebuilt in solid 1940s style; they are powered by modest amounts of central electricity, generated by manure, supplemented by point-source hot-water solar and wind. There is no internet, much less metanet, and no satellite access (portrayed as ubiquitously critical to the outside world’s functioning). Business is conducted at a 1940s level, as is all physical culture. Clothes are throwbacks—made of high quality, long-lasting materials, rather than the disposable “bioplastic” found in the outside world. Economically, Lakeland is somewhere on the continuum to distributism—the Grange is back in action, concentrations of wealth with disproportionate power are forbidden, and associations and other intermediary institutions are ubiquitous. Subsidiarity, rather than concentration, is the rule; banks are individual and tied to the community, for example. Automation is rejected as costing a society more than it provides, if properly accounted. ..."

The future the USA could have had, sigh: "A brief history of Steve Jobs’ automated factory at NeXT" https://www.cultofmac.com/news/a-brief-history-of-steve-jobs... "Put simply, there was never any necessity for NeXT to have an automated factory. Jobs might have been right that the future of just-in-time manufacturing would involve a heavy dose of automation, but it made no financial sense whatsoever to have a plant staffed with the latest robots for such a low volume business. The problem with NeXT came down to one thing: no-one (relatively speaking) was buying the computers."

Good point and links on architecture. I am so grateful to the architecture student who told me about Jane Jacobs around 1990 and opened my eyes to how much urban architecture design (things like height restrictions as in Philadelphia, unsafe edge effects of big special-purpose areas, sidewalks & porches, and mixed-use zoning) can affect human behavior and "eyes on the street" safety. I also liked the point that new ideas require old buildings (for cheap rents).

This article and your comment makes me think of Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2.0" book where he writes that (at least) four things can shape human behavior:

    * rules
    * norms
    * prices
    * architecture

Hopefully we could do so in a "Kaizen" approach of incremental improvement and usually small steps within existing cities? But we likely need a lot of new cities too with more housing (perhaps by upgrading towns on existing transit lines). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

Just saw this idea recently -- to add to your list: "Magnetars’ strong flares forge gold and other heavy elements" https://earthsky.org/space/strong-flares-magnetars-forge-hea... "After black holes, neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe. A neutron star forms when the core of a massive star collapses during a supernova explosion. Intense gravitational forces compress the core, reducing most of its elements to subatomic particles called neutrons. And magnetars are neutron stars with intense magnetic fields. On April 29, 2025, astronomers said a powerful flare unleashed by a magnetar, named SGR 1806–20, created large amounts of heavy elements including gold, strontium, uranium and platinum. They think magnetar flares could produce as much as 10% of the heavy elements in our galaxy."

Thanks for the example. I agree they look very similar, which is what dsego saw intuitively and commented on.

The difference in the two examples is essentially whether things need to be proxied or not.

If someone does not mind that proxying, then Aberdeen has an advantage over Mithril by avoiding the complexity of the vdom internally. So, presumably the rendering code is simpler, which may have some benefits in performance and also debuggability in some cases. You can get surprising vdom-code-related errors from Mithril sometimes for something misconfigured in a hyperscript "m" call. Also the vdom regeneration can sometimes have issues if you don't specify a "key" for each m() widget, needed sometimes so the vdom can be sure to replace DOM nodes efficiently and correctly.

If someone does mind the proxying requirement (like me), then Mithril has the advantage in that regard of seeming simpler to code for (without the data wrappers). Mithril applications also may be easier to debug in some other cases -- because you don't have an extra proxy levels as indirection in viewing your data model.

So, both approaches have their pros and cons depending on preferences and priorities.

Thanks for the replies. Having to add "proxy" or similar everywhere is the ergonomics issue to me (others might disagree).

Yes, I noticed that similarity too a bit -- from the use of a "HyperScript"-like approach (although Mithril can be used with JSX too). https://mithril.js.org/hyperscript.html

Aberdeen is innovative in that it's great to be able to avoid the VDOM in a technical sense. For fun, years ago, I messed around with a different technical approach of just rendering HTML from code directly (similar to Aberdeen to that extent), but instead of an observables-ish idea, I used Mithril's approach of hooking into the event listening system to trigger redraws by wrapping event handlers. Of course, I quickly ran into the issue of losing state like cursor insertion points in editors when re-rendering (which is what motivates the vdom approach). I can wonder if maybe the HTML standard itself could be upgraded somehow to support that approach of replacement of HTML widgets but with retained widget state if an ID or such remains the same?

While I applaud Aberdeen as an experiment, with Aberdeen, it seems problematical developer ergonomics to have everything be a reactive pipeline of some form of observables or signals. It's not especially more terrible than many other systems (e.g. Angular in practice, encouraging the use of RxJS Observables as a new way of encouraging writing hard-to-understand code). As Aberdeen has the previously mentioned innovation of avoiding the vdom, overall it might be a win for people who like that style of coding.

But by comparison, I have found Mithril is so much easier to work with -- given the core idea of just assuming the UI is "dirty" after any listened-for event happens and re-rendering it.

It's true though that Angular has a "Zones" approach to redraw when state changes which hides a lot of complexity but has OK developer ergonomics similar to Mithril in that sense -- until you get mired in RxJS code encouraged by the platform (at least when I last used it seven or so years ago). And then Angular code get mired in various other Angular-isms which requires bloated code in practice with lots of files to do the simplest component. Yes, you can try to work around a proliferation of files, but that is not the Angular way, or at least was not several years ago. And Angular advocates would argue the standardization is a big win for larger projects with multiple developers. YMMV.

Also, dsego, thanks for submitting to HN in 2022 the essay I wrote on all that (which I just saw thinking prompted by seeing this article to check if it had already been submitted somehow): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25194873

For others, this the essay which goes into more depth comparing developer ergonomics of React, Angular, and Mithril from my experience: "Why I prefer Mithril over Angular and React" https://github.com/pdfernhout/choose-mithril

For a simple Mithril example with no special Observable or signal magic, see, say: https://kevinfiol.com/blog/simple-state-management-in-mithri...

    let count = 0;

    const Counter = {
      view: () =>
        m('div',
          m('h1', 'Counter'),
          m('p', count),
          m('button', { onclick: () => count += 1 }, '+'),
          m('button', { onclick: () => count -= 1 }, '-')
        )
    };

    m.mount(document.body, Counter);

As a deeper issue on "justification", here is something I wrote related to this in 2001 on the risks of non-profits engaging in self-dealing when they create artificial scarcity to enrich themselves:

https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#...

"Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great value to others who would build on that product. They could put it on the internet at basically zero cost and let everyone have it effectively for free. Or instead, they could restrict access to that work to create an artificial scarcity by requiring people to pay for licenses before accessing the content or making derived works. If they do the latter and require money for access, the non-profit can perhaps create revenue to pay the employees of the non-profit. But since the staff probably participate in the decision making about such licensing (granted, under a board who may be all volunteer), isn't that latter choice still in a way really a form of "self-dealing" -- taking public property (the content) and using it for private gain? From that point of view, perhaps restricting access is not even legal?"

"Self-dealing might be clearer if the non-profit just got a grant, made the product, and then directly sold the work for a million dollars to Microsoft and put the money directly in the staff's pockets (who are also sometimes board members). Certainly if it was a piece of land being sold such a transaction might put people in jail. But because the content or software sales are small and generally to their mission's audience they are somehow deemed OK. The trademark-infringing non-profit-sheltered project I mention above is as I see it in large part just a way to convert some government supported PhD thesis work and ongoing R&D grants into ready cash for the developers. Such "spin-offs" are actually encouraged by most funders. And frankly if that group eventually sells their software to a movie company, say, for a million dollars, who will really bat an eyebrow or complain? (They already probably get most of their revenue from similar sales anyway -- but just one copy at a time.) But how is this really different from the self-dealing of just selling charitably-funded software directly to Microsoft and distributing a lump sum? Just because "art" is somehow involved, does this make everything all right? To be clear, I am not concerned that the developers get paid well for their work and based on technical accomplishments they probably deserve that (even if we do compete for funds in a way). What I am concerned about is the way that the proprietary process happens such that the public (including me) never gets full access to the results of the publicly-funded work (other than a few publications without substantial source)."

That said, charging to provide a service that costs money to supply (e.g. GPU compute) is not necessarily self-dealing. It is restricting the source code or using patents to create artificial scarcity around those services that could be seen that way.

Coincidentally, and as another pre-1.0 fart myself :-) -- one who remembers when Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" was still just a wild hope -- I was thinking of something similar the other day (not USPS-specific for hosting, but I like that).

It was sparked by going to a video conference "Hyperlocal Heroes: Building Community Knowledge in the Digital Age" hosted by New_ Public: https://newpublic.org/ "Reimagine social media: We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to explore creating digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect."

A not-insignificant amount of time in that one-hour teleconference was spent related to funding models for local social media and local reporting.

Afterwards, I got to thinking. The USA spent literally trillions of dollars on the (so-many-problematical-things-about-it-I-better-stop-now) Iraq war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War "According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 including interest."

Or, from a different direction, the USA spends about US$200 billion per year on mostly-billboard-free roads: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... "In 2021, state and local governments provided three-quarters of highway and road funding ($154 billion) and federal transfers accounted for $52 billion (25 percent)."

That's about US$700 per person per year on US roads.

So, clearly huge amounts of money are available in the USA if enough people think something is important. Imagine if a similar amount of money went to funding exactly what you outlined -- a free web presence for distributed social media -- with an infrastructure funded by tax dollars instead of advertisements. Isn't a healthy social media system essential to 21st century online democracy with public town squares?

And frankly such a distributed social media ecosystem in the USA might be possible for at most a tenth of what roads cost, like perhaps US$70 per person per year (or US$20 billion per year)?

Yes, there are all sorts of privacy and free speech issues to work through -- but it is not like we don't have those all now with the advertiser-funded social media systems we have. So, it is not clear to me that such a system would be immensely worse than what we have.

But what do I know? :-) Here was a previous big government suggestion be me from 2010 -- also mostly ignored (until now 15 years later the USA is in political crisis over supply chain dependency and still isn't doing anything very related to it yet): "Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA" https://web.archive.org/web/20100708160738/http://pcast.idea... "Being able to make things is an important part of prosperity, but that capability (and related confidence) has been slipping away in the USA. The USA needs more large neighborhood shops with a lot of flexible machine tools. The US government should fund the construction of 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion, places where any American can go to learn about and use CNC equipment like mills and lathes and a variety of other advanced tools and processes including biotech ones. That is one for every town and county in the USA. These shops might be seen as public extensions of local schools, essentially turning the shops of public schools into more like a public library of tools. This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all."

Something I wrote related to this in 2001: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society" https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.

I wrote StoryHarp for creating speech-interactive choose-your-own text adventures back around 1998 (in Delphi for Windows desktop), and ported it to the web about seven years ago (with some limitations) using TypeScript and Tachyons: https://storyharp.com/v3.0

Realistically, StoryHarp might be most fun to use as an authoring tools for kids making short idiosyncratic adventures to share with friends. StoryHarp could help people practice creative writing and learn just a bit of logic to set up puzzles (without getting bogged down in more computing complexity like writing C code or even just the conceptual demands of TADS or Inform, as amazing as those tools are).

I recently added a option (inspired by "flems.io") where you can create a StoryHarp link that includes the entire world definition in the hash. For example, here is a URL for a game that just says "You are visiting the Hacker News website" when you click "look": https://storyharp.com/v3.0/#world=N4Ig7g9gTgNgJgMQJYwKYDkCGB...

Otherwise the game stores data only in the browser (not the server) which can be exported or imported as files.

While I can see how LLMs might make for more realistic interactions with text adventures, writing text adventures is its own sort of puzzle (like coding programs manually), and I am not sure adding LLMs will really make creating such adventures a much more joyful experience. But maybe it could. I agree in general though that text adventures make a great playground for experimenting with new ideas (as with StoryHarp as an experiment in bringing browser ideas from Smalltalk into interactive fiction design).

P.S. I just expanded that Hacker News story with a couple more rules so you can have more of an experience: https://storyharp.com/v3.0/#world=N4Ig7g9gTgNgJgMQJYwKYDkCGB...

Anyway, that is the sort of idiosyncratic short experiential interactive fiction I am talking about. Just spend five or ten minutes and make something that captures an emotion or a theme or a concern or an moral conundrum or whatever.

Thanks! And at least Hacker News can help: :-) "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43547611

In theory, a general strike is always one more check on political power: "What would a general strike in the US actually look like?" https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/what-would-general-str... "Calls for a general strike in the US are growing. It's important to understand how to organize one, given their key role in overcoming tyrants around the world."

Also from there: "Calls for mass disruptive action are coming from unlikely places, like Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, an organization normally associated with legal action through the courts. When Romero was asked in a recent interview what would happen if the Trump administration systematically defied court orders, he replied, “Then we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”"

For a science-fiction version of a general strike and related resistance, see James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "The story was republished in other Eastern European countries where its depiction of nonviolent resistance against authority proved popular. In 1989, Hogan attended a convention in Kraków before travelling to Warsaw to meet the publishers of the magazine serial and draw out the money he had been paid. However, inflation following the collapse of the communist regime had reduced the value of the money in the account to just $8.43. Hogan concluded: "So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest, that was my tab for toppling the Soviet empire. There's always an easy way if you just look.""

Of course, opinions across the political spectrum still widely differ on whether what is going on is good or bad (including opinions and priorities related to "identity politics"). Will those sentiments change as political things continue to play out (for good or bad) and get to the point where there becomes a broad sentiment for a general strike? Frankly, I don't know. For example, a lot of people think it would be a good thing to reshore manufacturing in the USA which hopefully also might eventually lower prices for manufactured goods (at least relative to wages). But whether current political actions will accomplish any of that is up for debate, as is whether reshoring manufacturing will bring back lots of good paying jobs to the USA or whether reshoring instead will just bring more automation and more wealth concentration. Some people may be willing to wait and see, while other people may have a specific opinion and may want to act politically on it.

As G. William Domhoff wrote decades ago in "Who Rules America": https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_freshstart.h... "Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up. On a less positive note, many ordinary white workers have priorities that they put ahead of economic issues. As all voting and field studies show, a large number of average white Americans do many things based on their skin color. They often vote Republican, for example, especially in the South. They protest against affirmative action programs. They live in segregated neighborhoods. White Americans also often vote their religion -- that is, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics who vote Republican are members of non-college-educated blue-collar and white-collar families. In terms of their economic situation, and their need for unions, they should be for the Democrats, but many of them aren't."

So, whatever one's economic opinions, the "identity politics" of it all is a separate issue (as above).

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics "Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, intelligence, and social class. The term encompasses various often-populist political phenomena and rhetoric, such as governmental migration policies that regulate mobility and opportunity based on identities, left-wing agendas involving intersectional politics or class reductionism, and right-wing nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic "others.""

Some parts from that long article I found especially interesting:

"Criticism of identity politics often comes from either the center-right or the far-left on the political spectrum. Many socialists, anarchists and Marxists have criticized identity politics for its divisive nature, claiming that it forms identities that can undermine their goals of proletariat unity and class struggle. On the other hand, many conservative think tanks and media outlets have criticized identity politics for other reasons, such as that it is inherently collectivist and prejudicial. Center-right critics of identity politics have seen it as particularist, in contrast to the universalism espoused by many liberal politics, or argue that it detracts attention from non-identity based structures of oppression and exploitation."

"Sociologist Charles Derber asserts that the American left is "largely an identity-politics party" and that it "offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn't offer a contextual analysis within capitalism." Both he and David North of the Socialist Equality Party posit that these fragmented and isolated identity movements which permeate the left have allowed for a far-right resurgence. Cornel West asserted that discourse on racial, gender and sexual orientation identity was "crucial" and "indispensable", but emphasized that it "must be connected to a moral integrity and deep political solidarity that hones in on a financialized form of predatory capitalism. A capitalism that is killing the planet, poor people, working people here and abroad." Historian Gary Gerstle writes that identity politics and multiculturalism thrived in the neoliberal era precisely because these movements did not threaten capital accumulation, and over the same period "pressure on capitalist elites and their supporters to compromise with the working class was vanishing." The ideological space to oppose capitalism shrank with the fall of communism, forcing the left to "redefine their radicalism in alternative terms"."

Identity politics is a complex topic, and how it is playing out specifically in the USA is a complex topic -- as is how it seems to relate to recent changes at the NSF including grant terminations.

For the USA to heal as a nation, we need to figure out a way to transcend divisions -- including divisions related to identity politics.

Disclaimer: A NSF grant that was terminated last week has directly affected my family.

To support your point, here is a 1975 book: "Resignation in protest : political and ethical choices between loyalty to team and loyalty to conscience in American public life" by Edward Weisband and Thomas M. Franck https://archive.org/details/resignationinpro00weis

From an Amazon review comment: "This book offers an insightful analysis into the history and norms involved in the tradition of resignation in the U.S. and the U.K. Why do the British tend to resign loudly in protest and Americans resign “to spend more time with family” while praising their president? How do these norms benefit and harm their respective systems? The book offered hints at the determinants of these norms. Written shortly after Nixon’s resignation, the principles discussed are enduring."

Some interesting results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resignation+in+protest

Including: "Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE" https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government... " More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”"

Disclaimer: A four year NSF grant which my wife was on and which was recently awarded and getting started was just terminated last Friday. The grant was to promote STEM interest in a specific historically-disadvantaged neighborhood in part by helping people (especially kids) see how things that they did everyday were connected to STEM -- with hopes the idea could then be used nationwide to promote STEM learning. It took about four calendar years of her (unpaid) involvement to get that grant -- including the main organization getting cooperation and commitment by many other people in various local groups.

Tangentially related: "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (1994) https://web.archive.org/web/20240327073938/https://www.its.c...

==== From there:

I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows exponentially. A pipeline, leaky or otherwise, would not have that result. It would only produce scientists in proportion to the flow of entering students.

I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result.

====

RIP Dr. David Gooodstein. I enjoyed your writing and your "Mechanical Universe" videos that helped people learn physics in a fun way. Sad to see your Caltech faculty website is no more, but thank goodness for the Internet Archive. Makes me a bit sad I turned down admission at Caltech and my chance to study with you.

Maybe DNS for mail addresses is like a Post Office Box number? :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_office_box

With 20/20 hindsight, if the FSF had used a P.O. Box number in the license, the license addresses would always be correct even if the FSF office changed addressed or (as now) was no longer maintained.

Of course, the cost of a P.O. box over 40 years would have added up to thousands of dollars and that is less money for FSF advocacy. And time spent going to the post office to check the box would also have taken away from advocacy time.

Another physical mail DNS-like idea is mail forwarding -- but it typically has time limits at the post office although not for private mail forwarders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_forwarding "Private mail forwarding services are also offered by private forwarding companies, who often offer features like the ability to see your mail online via a virtual mailbox. Virtual mailboxes usually have options to get your mail scanned, discard junk mail and forward mail to your current address."

Although strictly speaking, these forwarding services are not quite like DNS (even if they do get at the idea of indirection). A true mail DNS would be more like a service you mail a post card to with a person's or organization's name and which mails a post card back to you which tells you what address to currently write to in order to reach that person or organization. (At least, if you write to that received address during some time-to-live window of validity of the address.) And I guess Encrypted DNS would be like you and the service using more expensive security envelopes instead of post cards? :-)

I'm getting more at things like a perspective shift, like represented with ideas at these links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

https://www.remineralize.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cost+of+militarism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-competition/

https://www.pop.org/overpopulation-myth/

https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/298-june-19-1979/the-ori...

https://archive.org/details/AdvancedAutomationForSpaceMissio...

https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanE...

https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSoc...

https://pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-pers...

https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080930065642/http://www.whywor... "I [Bob Black] don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."

And so on...

Ground up rock dust can be surprisingly effective to restore soil fertility: https://www.remineralize.org/

In general: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rock+dust+soil+amendment

From the article:

====

History suggests normal AI may introduce many kinds of systemic risks While the risks discussed above have the potential to be catastrophic or existential, there is a long list of AI risks that are below this level but which are nonetheless large-scale and systemic, transcending the immediate effects of any particular AI system. These include the systemic entrenchment of bias and discrimination, massive job losses in specific occupations, worsening labor conditions, increasing inequality, concentration of power, erosion of social trust, pollution of the information ecosystem, decline of the free press, democratic backsliding, mass surveillance, and enabling authoritarianism.

If AI is normal technology, these risks become far more important than the catastrophic ones discussed above. That is because these risks arise from people and organizations using AI to advance their own interests, with AI merely serving as an amplifier of existing instabilities in our society.

There is plenty of precedent for these kinds of socio-political disruption in the history of transformative technologies. Notably, the Industrial Revolution led to rapid mass urbanization that was characterized by harsh working conditions, exploitation, and inequality, catalyzing both industrial capitalism and the rise of socialism and Marxism in response.

The shift in focus that we recommend roughly maps onto Kasirzadeh’s distinction between decisive and accumulative x-risk. Decisive x-risk involves “overt AI takeover pathway, characterized by scenarios like uncontrollable superintelligence,” whereas accumulative x-risk refers to “a gradual accumulation of critical AI-induced threats such as severe vulnerabilities and systemic erosion of econopolitical structures.” ... But there are important differences: Kasirzadeh’s account of accumulative risk still relies on threat actors such as cyberattackers to a large extent, whereas our concern is simply about the current path of capitalism. And we think that such risks are unlikely to be existential, but are still extremely serious.

====

That tangentially relates to my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." Because as our technological capabilities continue to change, it becomes ever more essential to revisit our political and economic assumptions.

As I outline here: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" agencies [and economic corporations] are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines [and economic machines] and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political [and economic] mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."

A couple Slashdot comments by me from Tuesday, linking to stuff I have posted on risks form AI and other advanced tech -- and ways to address those risks -- back to 1999:

https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23665937&cid=65308877

https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23665937&cid=65308923

So, AI just cranks up an existing trend of technology-as-an-amplifier to "11". And as I've written before, if it is possible our path out of any singularity may have a lot to do with our moral path going into the singularity, we really need to step up our moral game right now to make a society that works better for everyone in healthy joyful ways.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." ... Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative [the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services] upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives [to impose upon the world a system of thought and action and to create employment]. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."