What’s the difference between racism and nationalism*?

Considerable progress has been made over the past 100 years to establish that racism is morally wrong and indeed legislation has been passed in many countries to outlaw racial discrimination and generally impose harsher penalties on crimes which show evidence of racial motivation.  The era of apartheid in South Africa has ended and while it would be very naïve to think that there are no longer racial problems in the world you at least seem to be making progress. 

The situation with nationalism however is much less satisfactory at present.  Broadly it seems that racism is discrimination based on who you were born to or the particular ethnicity of others.  Nationalism remains as discrimination based largely on where you were born.  From my position of viewing the planet as a whole the moral distinction your societies generally have between the two seems highly questionable.

It seems likely that nationalism in all its form is just a legacy from existing structures.  Clearly the ruling elite in each country had to take a different approach to both problems:

a)  Racism in a multi-cultural nation was a threat to stability and could lead to violence and therefore it should be outlawed.

b) Nationalism on the other hand must be to a great extent encouraged as the key offering of a nation is to ‘protect’ its citizens from the serious threats posed by foreigners and other countries.  Indeed the whole ethos of a country is to try and ensure its citizens get the best deal and in general that will mean being a little bit unreasonable and exerting power and influence particularly over weaker countries.  There may also be requirements to go to war from time to time to attempt to plunder riches and rewards from other countries and consequently a good deal of national pride must be cultivated.

Furthermore people in every other country are so totally different from your home country that they can neither be trusted nor fully understood.  They seem to want different things and have different priorities because they are on the other side of an arbitrary line on the map and often communicate in a different language that is difficult to understand.  These people were generally born on the other side of that line and so it’s considered quite appropriate to discriminate against them.  We may allow a few of them to adopt our nationality if they pay us some money and have skills that we need.  This can be unpopular with some of our existing nationals but when we have built up such large debts some influx of new people is probably necessary to provide some credibility to our attempts to service them.

When you break through the stranglehold that your existing countries have over all of you it seems likely that nationalism will be judged by history to have been every bit as morally repugnant as many of your enlightened citizens consider racism to be today.  Once again Einstein was on the right lines when he said “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

*Some remarks in this document may be sarcastic

Global warming is not the real issue

I have been reviewing some of your literature on global warming and can only conclude that you really haven’t properly addressed the real issues at all.  There is a huge amount of focus on the consequences for specific areas and the potential for slightly more unpredictable weather patterns, albeit weather patterns have always been quite unpredictable and will remain so whether or not global warming happens.

I think the key point that is being missed and it actually IS very important is that a great deal of the earth’s land lies in northern latitudes.   Admittedly not nearly as much as it appears from looking at your typical rectangular map where Mercator’s projection significantly overstates the polar regions.  However any way you look at it Siberia is a large, often cold, and sparsely populated area of land.   It’s a bit too flippant to observe that if the Greenland ice cap were to melt the new land that would become available for possible habitation would be only marginally smaller than the area of Greenland.  However the overall point that there will be huge areas that are net beneficiaries of global warming simply doesn’t seem to be getting made.  Humans seem to default into all change is bad and fight it every inch of the way when the reality is that change is inevitable and you must strive to embrace it.  Another ice age would be very challenging for humanity and some people would need to move - however it's not at all clear that the current temperature of the planet is actually optimal for maximum human life.

Please understand I fully accept that climate change is happening and will continue to happen and it is largely caused by human activity.  The issues you need to address are what rate of change can you cope with and are your present structures suitable for that change. 

Let me answer the second issue quickly and emphatically – NO.  Climate change is going to place further strain on certain geographies.  Your present structures of countries and borders restricting the free movement of people around the world is the real issue you need to be picking up and raising awareness of.   The level of protectionism in the world remains enormous and while there has been significant progress on racial discrimination in the last century, the progress on national discrimination has actually been fairly limited.  Many countries still have quite strong factions looking to curtail immigration and protect what they have.  There are some pressure groups such as no-one is illegal that take the other side of the argument – however the prevalent thinking still seems to be along the lines of you weren’t born here – you have no right to live here unless you can give us a lot of money or we think we need you.  This is a major issue that needs to be debated.  Philosophically it looks very dubious as nobody gets to choose where they are born. 

However while living standards across the world remain so variable there is obviously a very valid concern that a fully open borders policy could lead to huge floods of people and an overall decline in life expectancy and quality of life.  The first step on the journey to open borders is probably to commit to minimum global living standards everywhere.  If that commitment were credible then many people some would probably prefer to stay and help develop their local communities rather than migrate far away from friends and families.  While some groups could move and bring their friends and extended families with them, just as happened in prior centuries.  This is the debate you need to be having if we are to progress to a better future quicker.

Is human virtualisation worthwhile?

I have been mulling over this question for a couple of days now – it’s a bit of a meatier topic than usual so this post will be a bit longer.  The IT industry has harnessed significant benefits from virtualisation of servers in recent years.   It’s a reasonable question to consider whether human virtualisation would be a worthwhile activity.

Firstly it probably makes sense to define what I mean by virualisation.  For me it would be a 3 step process:

1                     Storing information about you

2                     Delivering that information in various forms

3                     Merging, developing and simulating in different ways

There seems to be relatively little discussion of this topic available at present.  If anyone can send me links to some more discussions on this that would be great.  We will examine each step in a bit of detail.

Storing information about you

 Step 1 is probably the simplest and most clearly defined.  Ray Kurzweil suggests that we only have around 18 more years before nanobots and the like may be able to complete step 1 for us.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1322218/Humans-able-brain-decades-claims-scientist.html  However not everyone may be able to wait for that to happen and there is no obvious reason not to start now.

There are more low tech guides on how to do this eg http://www.wikihow.com/Back-Up-Your-Memories-and-Ideas.   However this may seem like rather a lot of effort.  I am thinking of some more middle ground where there is an on-line service providing some sort of structure into which you record:

1                     Your detailed bio-graphical data and curriculum vitae

2                     Your vision, values and beliefs

3                     Your likes and dislikes

4                     Your abilities and disabilities

Current technology is clearly more than capable of providing this sort of capability and some photographs and video footage could easily be added on.  Participation in the sort of networked decision making system that is I have outlined would also be extremely useful in recording users opinions on key issues and could provide an ongoing source of data about people’s opinions.

Delivering that information

Step two is clearly the key point – why are you doing this.  While there is a risk that this becomes  something of an ego-building process and is about as beneficial to society as a circle-jerk I am coming round to the view that this really isn’t the case.  Perhaps the initial and obvious reason for recording some details about you is so that future generations of your family can see and understand what you were like.   Many families have family trees and much pleasure is gained from tracing those back through time.   If future generations could actually see and understand some of what made you tick then I think that would be appreciated.  Most western civilisations are trying to saddle future generations with a significant burden of sovereign debt – this would at least provide something they might enjoy to go along with it.  Perhaps those poiticians most responsible for the build-up of debt might even be able to explain why even though we understood that the perpetual motion machine was impossible we thought that perpetual borrowing would work out OK. 

While this may be the simplest and most obvious reason to back yourself up it is probably not the most beneficial.  If you can assess your own skills, abilities, vision and values then so can your friends and colleagues and if this data gathering exercise was extended to them then you could quickly learn where there were differences between your perception of yourself and other peoplesSo personal development and review seems to be a valid and worthwhile reason to record and commit to storage some details of who you are.  Undoubtedly people will probably choose to apply a little bit of ‘air-brushing’ to their lives – however this may actually provide a catalyst for real positive change as people strive to become more like the person they want to be.  Obviously most of you are not like Alfred Nobel and don’t get the chance to read your own obituary, so some earlier feedback on how people think you are is likely to be helpful in allowing you to ensure an accurate and desirable record of your life and achievements has been recorded.

Merging, developing and simulating 

There are three rather more interesting reasons why this sort of backup may be worthwhile and these are as follows:

1                     It should allow a virtual model of you to be created and take actions when you’re not there

2                     It should be relatively simple to merge models and create a single model from a group of individuals

3                     Using both 1 and 2 it should be possible to run simulations of various events and see if your virtual person behaves the same way you do

You are obviously getting ever closer to passing the Turing test and once you can simulate a general human then it is only a question of tweaking the variables to simulate a specific human – obviously collecting some data on the variables is a required step to do that.  At present it is a little like human cryonics industry where you don’t know how to bring the data back to life at present.   However I expect that virtual people will become re-animated a good deal sooner than the frozen ones.  The costs of data storage are also reaching the point that this is quite viable for much of humanity whereas storing all your corpses in liquid nitrogen represents isn’t really practical when there are so many other problems to address among  the living..

Many parents would I think like the idea that they could provide some ‘virtual assistance’ to their children as they grow up and potentially having virtualised versions of great leaders and experts in their field could be quite transformational to human progress.

However most individuals have at least a few rough edges and the potential to merge different individuals into a composite which represents the views and values of a particular group is also potentially extremely powerful.  This could support the creation of virtual leaders and also greatly simplify group negotiations if two groups could be summarised into their overall position and then identify areas of agreement and disagreement.
The storage of individuals vision and values would also allow for simulation of events and developments to take place and outcomes to be predicted.  This could help identify the best course of actions for both self-development and conflict resolution.  The benefits are potentially enormous.

So I think overall there are good and valid reasons for developing a human backup system to help human progress.  However for those of you that are rational and consequently atheist then at present you probably believe that you can only really live on after your death in the hearts and minds of those that knew you.  A good backup system would also allow future generations not yet born to get to know a bit more about what you were like.   It may also be helpful to pass your wisdom on to future generations.  Children don’t always listen to their parents but if five generations of their ancestors are all telling them the same thing then they may take a little more heed.  I’m not sure there is anything wrong with wanting to be able to do this.  Furthermore it looks like virtualising yourself could be a great deal of fun and the earlier you start doing it the more time you’d have left to improve the model.  Yes there’s some risk that we end up spending all our time preening our virtual self, but a little bit of self-review and reflection probably won’t do us any harm and hopefully our virtual self’s will start telling us where to go if we start to get self-obsessed.
Conclusion

Human backup and virtualisation is an exciting new field that technology is now making possible.  It appears to be both worthwhile and fun to start doing this and the market and potential for this service is potentially huge.   Obviously some further discussion on the merits and mechanisms of delivering this service would be required.  However virtual immortality in at least a basic form is likely to be achievable within the next decade if the demand for it is there.

 

 

Israel Gaza conflict resumes

So the conflict between Israel and Gaza has been revived.  Superficially this looks like a politically motivated execution allowing the Israeli leader to show his strength in the run-up to elections in January.  Clearly there is no greater display of strength possibly than flexing your countries military might.
 
However the problems in the Middle East are all very deep rooted and the prospects for lasting peace will probably remain limited until a successful crusade of atheism and science can sweep away many of the existing structures and thinking.

Yes it’s a problem that rockets are being sent into southern Israel – however if I was to take human form and land it still looks to me to be a lot more pleasant living in southern Israel than it is in Gaza.
 
On the face of it however the Israeli leader’s action does appear to be in conflict with the proposed global strategy of extending life expectancy to 80 by 2020.  There have now been a number of casualties from the conflict.  If we can ratify the plan and put existing global leaders on notice then his access to future advances in life-extending healthcare would need to be reviewed and considered carefully.  Obviously he is just doing what suits him best and this provides the best chance of re-election – however we need to raise the bar in terms of the required behaviour standards for both leaders and everyone else if we are to achieve our vision and there will need to be consequences for those that are reluctant to change otherwise we will not move the world forward.

President Obama repeals laws of mathematics

Either the USA has moved to a different planet overnight or the laws of mathematics have been repealed for the Presdent’s second term. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/president-obamas-acceptance-speech-full-transcript/2012/11/07/ae133e44-28a5-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_story_3.html

The acceptance speech this time included the great insight that:

 “ if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.”

So either America has now discovered unlimited wealth which was in very limited evidence during the first term or other physical limits have been now been removed for the second term.  Obviously if you don’t feel you’re making it in America then you are simply not working hard enough or unwilling to try!  All you really need to do is work a bit harder than the next guy and you should be alright.  Obviously there is quite a significant percentage, certainly a good deal higher than the official 8% or so that aren’t working at all.  However that’s pretty much your fault too and you should just get a job and work hard – there is an awful lot of govt debt  and we need to tax you to have any chance of credibly growing this over the next four years.  The fact the president’s healthcare reforms are likely to have the unintended consequence of driving many from full-time to part time work isn’t really relevant here.

If we define ‘making it’ fairly generously as an income of $50,000 and assume you are flipping burgers in MacDonalds at around $8 an hour then based on working 250 days per year you would only need to work 25hrs a day in order to make it.  Clearly this will present no problem to you in the fantasyland the president now envisions.  It’s not clear how long the day is on this new planet but hopefully there will also be some time for spending money as consumption is also essential to collecting taxes and the Government finds it easier to grow if taxes are rising too.

The fact that technology and progress is removing the requirement for many jobs can rightly be viewed as potentially beneficial.  However it really does mean there is massively less work that needs to be done than there was previously.  If everybody in work is trying to work harder and longer than everyone else then we inevitably end up with the sort of ridiculous distribution of wealth and leisure time that we have at the moment.  We need to face up to this problem, make all of our jobs much easier to do, and then work out how we share work, wealth and leisure between us in a sensible and adult manner.  The real opportunity for progress is immense – however none of our politicians seem to have any sort of grasp on how to deliver this.  I think a global strategy and effective use of existing technology as detailed at http://www.scribd.com/doc/98216626/New-Global-Strategy can provide the answer.

What a waste of money

So another election finally reaches its conclusion.  It seems the final cost of the election will be of the order of $6 Billion.  This is a significant sum of money.  The voting age population is around 230 million.  So this appears to be a cost of around $26 for every voting citizen in the US.  Rather a lot if you ask me.  If we accept that 10% of this cost is necessary and generously assume that 90% of this spend is waste then we reach a figure of $5.4Bn that could have been spent elsewhere. 

Ill health and starvation are obvious alternatives for spending and if we assume it costs around $1 a day to keep a child from starvation and recognise that this waste only occurs every 4 years then the available annual spend is around $1.35Billion.  Which it seems would be enough to save 3.7 Million children from starvation.  Allegedly around 13,000 children die each day from malnutrition so spending less on US elections alone could cure 80% of the problem with child hunger in the world.

Better still of course would be to not have elections at all and move to on-going participation by citizens in making decisions on a global basis as I have outlined is the governance  model  that operates on the more advanced planets.

If disease is considered as an alternative priority to hunger then a malaria prevention kit costs around $20 and it is only $5 for rotavirus vaccine according to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotavirus_vaccine

So that would allow 270 Million children to be vaccinated against this nasty disease.

Obviously this analysis only looks at the actual election and related costs.  Arguably this is only a small part of the problem as people funding electoral campaigns are probably much closer to the Shylock than the Mother Teresa School of giving.  Consequently whoever is elected will be expected to lavishly reward those who helped get them there and consequently 4 more years of bad decision making can be anticipated whoever gets elected today.

The other significant problem with current politics is the highly adversarial and somewhat childish nature of debate.  In England they say Prime Ministers are made on the playing fields of Eton.  The problem is that there is very limited evidence of politicians actually maturing and progressing beyond childish antics and points scoring exercises.  If we are to move forward we need to look at a far more co-operative approach to problem solving and avoid concentrating so much power in so few hands.   Fortunately we now have the technology to make this possible.   We just need to improve democracy by incorporating existing technology to allow on-going participation in the process.  The current arrangement of lobbying and waste is truly horrific and holding back human progress.  In no sense can it be regarded as a pinnacle of human organisation and achievement.

The wealthy elite must be protected at all costs and journalists put in jail

I’m new round here and still practising what you call sarcasm, perhaps you can give me some feedback on how I’ m doing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20163430

So the Greeks are trying to lock up a journalist for naming and shaming those with Swiss bank accounts.  This is important journalists must realise that the elite live by different rules to everyone else and furthermore it is quite expensive to setup a Swiss bank account.  On no account should one have to pay for a bank account and also have to pay taxes at the same time.  You sometimes pay a few taxes while you are getting rich but once you’ve arrived then these things are just for the little people and there need to be sufficient loopholes, opportunities and privacy that you can stop paying taxes once you get really rich.  While personal privacy is important, disclosing that you have a bank account is hardly a huge invasion, particularly when it appears that many were not paying taxes on the related income.

It’s not as if the Greek economy is struggling in any way or if there is a shortage of money.  Debt to GDP is likely to reach 190% so there really is no need or point to the rich paying taxes to help steady the ship.  No this journalist must be locked up and privacy protected, we simply can’t have information on rich people not paying tax made public, that’s totally unacceptable.  How can society possibly progress if the rich have to pay taxes.

Global Trade Forecast Released

Today, as a bit of a change I thought I’d update my forecast for the global trade deficit for 2013. There was some concern that a deficit might develop in 2012 if I were to start charging for advice. Once I explained that advanced planets have phased out money and I don't charge for advice that concern has now passed. Consequently, the latest forecast for the global trade surplus/deficit for 2013 remains at zero. While there may be some further spacecraft launches none of them yet has any external commercial purpose and so will not generate any surplus and you have not yet entered into any commercial arrangement with another planet that could lead to a deficit

The leisure index, another key economic indicator of those not currently employed, looks likely to remain fairly elevated throughout 2013. Deleveraging and debt restructuring tends to reduce the sustainable market price for labour and this reduction in expected returns, combined with previous anchoring at higher wage levels will probably lead to unhappy unemployment for some time to come. This remains disappointing given the rather sub-standard state of most of your software at present and the major remaining limtiations to your scientific knowledge especially in life sciences. The general state of the planet also remains poor to awful in many areas, so there really is no shortage of things that could be getting worked on.

 



On a more positive note however irrespective of the level of debt or derivative financial instruments in force I can confirm that none of the 2014 harvest or rainfall will be consumed during 2013. Global warming seems likely to continue and this will certainly make habitation in northern latitudes a little easier. It will still be quite a few years before much of Greenland becomes habitable but improvements in crop development should allow cereal production to spread slowly north over time and this should increase global food supply.

 

GDP isn’t a measure I even bother to review however progress on global life expectancy still seems unacceptably slow and rising food prices are exacerbating the problems of poverty for many. If only someone would come up with a global strategy to prioritise the actions required for progress.  There is much work to do to achieve the 2020 vision of global life expectancy at 80 in 8 years time.

Put all the scientists in Jail.. that will really help

Italian Scientists Locked Up

You just couldn't make this up.  How on earth are we going to encourage people into science if we risk locking them up for giving their professional opinion.  It will likely remain extremely challenging for the foreseeable future to prevent natural disasters happening.  So we really do need to encourage people to try and study and understand them to the best of their ability without fearing either jail or mass panic if they get things wrong.

We continue to struggle with investing in science as the benefits are often long term and not adequately rewarded by our current 'free' market economics.  However this example puts a threat of jail over most of the scientific community with no obvious deterrent effect whatsoever.

This is the 21st century and we need to move forward - this sort of behaviour is like being back in the dark ages.  I fully understand what happened is very unfortunate and painful for those involved however this sort of revenge and political action is just unacceptable.

Discrimination against rational children

So the boy scouts now won't allow you to join if your an atheist.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/9627716/The-Scouts-should-be-open-to-atheists-as-well.html#dsq-comments

While many will just go along with the process this really is rather important as the right to choose a religion or atheism is a key part of a free society.  It is also critical to human progress that we resist driving any sort of divisions between children.  Richard Dawkins is generally correct when he states there should be no such thing as religious children, only children of religious parents. 

Forcing young people to pick some sort of irrational view to subscribe to in their formative years is really not helpful to human progress.  As I have stated previously it only makes sense to believe in God if you think he/she exists and you also believe that they are acting rationally.  While their is no evidence of existence, it is simply utterly irrational for something with that much power to be so silent and impotent while we stumble along at our own pace making progress as and where we can.  If God is irrational there is no real basis to consider a lifetime of suffering is the correct period for entry into some wonderful afterlife.

Inspiring a generation?

Greetings, I’m Russ King, I’ve travelled from afar and I’m currently orbiting your planet, absorbing your internet and making occasional observations as I see fit.  My general observations and thinking are available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/98216626/New-Global-Strategy – however these seem to be taking a long time to be absorbed so it seems that I may start writing the occasional blog to pass the time as I await instructions from my masters.

So that’s your Olympics over for another four years -what a great festival of sport this is – I must say at the outset that I really enjoyed the excitement and entertainment that you put on.  I picked up that many commentators were very concerned about the ‘legacy’ of the games. However I suggest that inspiring a an entire generation so that they can all go out and win gold medals is really rather stupid.  Indeed it seems that with every Olympics greater effort and more funding is required to be a medal winner.  Indeed in most human activities efficiency is slowly increasing over time – however Olympic medal winning seems to be an exception – there is still only one medal winner every 4 years in each event and it seems this is likely to remain the case for some time to come.  Increasing efficiency in medal winning overall therefore can only come from putting less effort in and reverting back to previous games when sport was largely amateur.

Let’s look at the host nation, it achieved 29 gold medals from a population of roughly 60 million perhaps only a quarter of the population is likely to be in their peak years at any point so the very rough odds of winning a medal are around 1 in half a million.  Unsurprisingly this is a bit better than the global figures where the final medal table reveals there were 302 awarded and the population is around 7 billion.  If we again take the rough and ready quartering of the population to a bit under 2 billion then the odds are around 1 in 5 million overall.  Not very good and the more that are ‘inspired’ to attempt this the greater the inefficiency of medal winning will be.

However the youth of today has serious challenges – clearly an unemployment rate of over 50% in countries such as Spain makes finding something else to do rather difficult.  However I would urge today’s youth to get inspired to make the world better rather than to try and win Olympic medals – this should be easier and a lot more satisfying.  Sport is for fun and while people’s participation in it should be encouraged they should not be expecting to win Olympic medals as that is rather unlikely to happen.