André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

[raja]

Mr

The Internet existed in 2002. Consider the recent example of public support of the invasion of Iraq, then tell us if it is possible for The People to realize the (real) purpose of such a war if TPTB state a different purpose?

Very different situation.

For one, the motivation is more powerful now.
Then, hundreds of soldiers dying monthly in Iraq.
Now, millions losing jobs, homes and retirement money. Much more powerful motivator . . . .

[jtabeb]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

I fear this is an idealistic desire, not reality.

It is MUCH simpler than that (or a follow-on idea if the proles actually wake up), all they have to do is TURN IT OFF.

Ask youself, what then?

How would you get information, opinions that you actually value, news that you trust.

The fight against un-reality dies when the internet does.

They will turn it off someday, I don' know how you prepare for that.

[raja]

Mr

I fear this is an idealistic desire, not reality.

EJ has noted that the internet seems mostly to group those of like minds together.

From my own part I note that the entire self-publication 'benefit' of the internet reduces the overhead necessary to splinter the populace.

After all, if you are a nasty politician with a strong but minority supporting demographic, the best thing you can do (Karl Rove channeling Mao) is to splinter the remaining share such that your minority is the largest bloc.

Stage 2 is then the polarization of the issues such that you can split off bits of each splinter faction into your solid bloc. This is where people like nakedcapitalism come in...

The People are being driven into poverty, while the Financial Elite are getting fabulously wealthy. The Politicians have allowed it to happen. Isn't this something that everyone can agree on? :eek:

Yes, the Internet is diverse. But the simplicity of the situation will allow all points of view to converge on the common enemies . . . the Financial Elite and their Politician Enablers. Can't you just hear the angry crowds chanting in the streets, "No More Banker Bailouts", "Incumbents Got To Go!", "Too Big To Fail, Too Big To Be".

Everybody has got a friend or relative that's lost a job, lost a home, or had their retirement savings decimated. It's going to get worse. Even the President has fingered the "Fat Cats" who are responsible. There hasn't been a social issue as compelling as this since the civil rights movement, and that campaign had an uphill battle against entrenched racism. In the case EVERYBODY is a victim . . . and we know who the guilty parties are.

This is a done deal . . . . .

[raja]

Mr

all they have to do is TURN IT OFF.

The fight against un-reality dies when the internet does.

They will turn it off someday, I don' know how you prepare for that.

It's too late, jtabeb.

TPTB can't turn off the Internet. Too much business. Too much communication. Too much entertainment. It's here to stay . . . .

[Rajiv]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

Free markets only work when the playing field is level, and everybody is equally endowed. As soon as wealth disparity and concentration of resources crops up, then free markets slowly will cause an increasing inequality.

Why it is hard to share the wealth

by Jenny Hogan



The rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor. If you doubt it, ponder these numbers from the US, a country widely considered meritocratic, where talent and hard work are thought to be enough to propel anyone through the ranks of the rich. In 1979, the top 1% of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20%. In 2000, this multiplier had grown to 88.5. If inequality is growing in the US, what does this mean for other countries?

Almost certainly more of the same, if you believe physicists who are using new models based on simple physical laws to understand the distribution of wealth. Their studies indicate that inequality in market economies may be very hard to get rid of.

Economists will join physicists to discuss these issues next week in Kolkata, India, at the first ever conference on the "econophysics" of wealth distribution. "We are interested in understanding whether there is some kind of social injustice behind this skewed distribution," says Sudhakar Yarlagadda of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) in Kolkata.

It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly. "People on the whole have normally distributed attributes, talents and motivations, yet we finish up with wealth distributions that are much more unequal than that," says Robin Marris, emeritus professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London.

Pareto's law

In 1897, a Paris-born engineer named Vilfredo Pareto showed that the distribution of wealth in Europe followed a simple power-law pattern, which essentially meant that the extremely rich hogged most of a nation's wealth (New Scientist print edition, 19 August 2000). Economists later realised that this law applied to just the very rich, and not necessarily to how wealth was distributed among the rest.

Now it seems that while the rich have Pareto's law to thank, the vast majority of people are governed by a completely different law. Physicist Victor Yakovenko of the University of Maryland in College Park, US, and his colleagues analysed income data from the US Internal Revenue Service from 1983 to 2001.

They found that while the income distribution among the super-wealthy - about 3% of the population - does follow Pareto's law, incomes for the remaining 97% fitted a different curve - one that also describes the spread of energies of atoms in a gas (see graphic).

Gas analogy

In the gas model, people exchange money in random interactions, much as atoms exchange energy when they collide. While economists' models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat people like atoms in a gas.

The analogy also holds because money is like energy, in that it has to be conserved. "It's like a fluid that flows in interactions, it's not created or destroyed, only redistributed," says Yakovenko.

Yakovenko also found that the total income of those in the poorer part of the distribution did not change significantly with time after accounting for inflation. But incomes for those in the Pareto curve shot up nearly five times from 1983 to 2000, before declining with the US stock market crash of 2001.
Class jumping

This, along with research data from other countries, suggests that there are two economic classes. In one, the rich grow richer while in the other the poor stay poor. Yakovenko explains this by going back to the analogy of atoms in a gas.

The atoms assume an exponential distribution of energy when they are in thermal equilibrium, and pushing the gas away from this state takes a lot of energy and it could prove similarly difficult to shift an economy to a different state. Randomness in the model does, however, mean that individuals can jump from one class to another.

"It suggests that any kind of policy will be very inefficient," says Yakovenko. It would be very difficult to impose a policy to redistribute wealth "short of getting Stalin", says Yakovenko, who will talk in Kolkata next week.

See also Pareto distribution

The Pareto distribution, named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, is a power law probability distribution that coincides with social, scientific, geophysical, actuarial, and many other types of observable phenomena. Outside the field of economics it is at times referred to as the Bradford distribution.


Pareto originally used this distribution to describe the allocation of wealth among individuals since it seemed to show rather well the way that a larger portion of the wealth of any society is owned by a smaller percentage of the people in that society.

Also see - An analytic treatment of the Gibbs-Pareto behavior in wealth distribution pdf can be obtained there

Abstract: We develop a general framework, based on Boltzmann transport theory, to analyze the distribution of wealth in societies. Within this framework we derive the distribution function of wealth by using a two-party trading model for the poor people while for the rich people a new model is proposed where interaction with wealthy entities (huge reservoir) is relevant. At equilibrium, the interaction with wealthy entities gives a power-law (Pareto-like) behavior in the wealth distribution while the two-party interaction gives a Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Mr

It's too late, jtabeb.

TPTB can't turn off the Internet. Too much business. Too much communication. Too much entertainment. It's here to stay . . . .

I agree.

Look at those nations that strive much harder than the U.S. does to control the internet, such as Iran and China. They may shutdown the DNS (name resolution) for certain sites, force ISP's to capture all transactions and refuse specific transactions, force ISP's to shutoff internet connectivity to specified "bad people", slow the internet down, or at critical moments and in critical locations, such as particular university, shut it down. But they don't just shut it off.

Shutting it down would require the co-operation (forced or not) of a large number of people, some of whom are rather notorious for their dedication to keeping the net running and for their dislike of tyranny. Once shut down, large numbers of people would be sticking their heads out their front doors and checking with their neighbors to see what was happening. If the powers that be couldn't keep Watts under control in August 1965, they would have no chance with keeping the civilians in line with this.

[aaron]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

...and grandma's lifestyle would likely be yet another step change from your mother's.

We are traveling through Orlando presently and had dinner at a popular chain restaurant last evening. Two adult couples and their five pre-adolescent children sat near us. The oldest was a boy of eight or nine, who carried (and used) a mobile phone -- a remarkable display of ostentation!

I just bought my kids cell phones. They were 15 dollars each with 120 prepaid minutes included. I explained that they would have to earn their extra minutes. Anyway, it is a small price to pay to be father-of-the-year for 5 minutes, and I do feel better that I can call them or they can call me when needed. It has already saved me some time. They are 10 and 9.

I bring this up because I have always been of the same opinion. What the hell does a 10 year old need a phone for? Now I know. It is cheap and convenient. Times have changed. This old fart needs to keep up.

[Starving Steve]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

I hate to sound like a Republican (a "Repuke"), but with technology, mankind can prosper for centuries. Granted: population growth has to be limited or reversed to negative-growth. Un-limited population growth is the problem the world now confronts.

Some ways to keep or even raise standards-of-livings: drill for oil especially at sea, fracture shales and drill, mine sea-water for minerals, filter sea-water to make fresh water, build dams, build power-plants, develop atomic energy, develop hydro-electric energy, divert rivers such as the Nile River, convert cars to run on natural gas, convert cars to run on diesel fuel, hybrid-cars, up-grade heavy oils and tar sands to make light oil, use more coal, etc.

Some ways to destroy our standard-of-living: Copenhagen Agreements, cater to eco-fools, habitat-preservation, carbon taxes, carbon credits, carbon banking, photo-voltaics, windmills, smart-grids, tidal power, animal power, geo-thermal schemes, stopping development, stopping urban growth, corn-ethanol schemes, hydrogen schemes, super-conductors, and wishful-thinking.

If only we had hydrogen power, but we don't and we won't. That is dreamland. Similarly, if only we had smart-grids. But we don't, and we won't, and we can't. The term "smart-grid" is meaningless as far as producing more energy, but the term "smart-grid" sounds real. (It has a buzz to it, and it appeals to the public.) Windmills produce power where there are no cities, for example: Wyoming. And to ship power to distant cities means almost no power arrives where it is needed. Geo-thermal means drilling down thousands of feet which means mega-costs. Ethanol is fine if it would be cheap, but it isn't cheap. Super-conductors mean using rare-Earth metals and incurring enormous costs, so super-conductors are not a meaningful solution to the energy problem. Photo-voltaics are a joke because the Sun's energy is too dispersed at the Earth's surface. You can't end-up with more energy than two-calories per square centimetre per minute, at best....... As I implied above, wishful-thinking is not a solution.

[Verrocchio]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

I just bought my kids cell phones. They were 15 dollars each with 120 prepaid minutes included. I explained that they would have to earn their extra minutes. Anyway, it is a small price to pay to be father-of-the-year for 5 minutes, and I do feel better that I can call them or they can call me when needed. It has already saved me some time. They are 10 and 9.

I bring this up because I have always been of the same opinion. What the hell does a 10 year old need a phone for? Now I know. It is cheap and convenient. Times have changed. This old fart needs to keep up.

Aaron, the purchase seems sensible for your (current) situation, and prepaid phones are a smart option for all of us, not just for kids. However, if we fast forward into Diederen's resource depletion scenario, then much of our current consumption behavior begins to look ostentatious. Our challenge is to (1) evaluate such scenarios, and (2) if the scenario seems highly probable, take it seriously.

[Raz]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

When in the history of the world has socialism ever marched along without ultimately been euthanized by power and control? I agree power and control will intensify - that is why we must fight it. A smart socialism fairly delegating resources is every bit the fantasy as is a world of peace and goodwill. Socialism is a religion. The question is do you want to assert your freedom or give in to the coercion of socialist masters? If you are worried about your neighbors stealing from you don't think the the thieves who sit in halls of governance will save you.

Thank you, abexman. Until I got to your post I thought I had entered a meeting of the Communist Internationale.

Alas, poor Capitalism! She's blamed for everything imaginable, especially by the people who through political manipulation have caused such market distortions she could hardly work at all. (Think: the GSEs, Community Reinvestment Act [the "You Better Lend to EVERYONE Act"], the long-gone Reg. "Q", Davis-Bacon, and at least fifty others.)

If Socialism is the answer then the question is wrong.

[jtabeb]

Re: Mr

I agree.

Look at those nations that strive much harder than the U.S. does to control the internet, such as Iran and China. They may shutdown the DNS (name resolution) for certain sites, force ISP's to capture all transactions and refuse specific transactions, force ISP's to shutoff internet connectivity to specified "bad people", slow the internet down, or at critical moments and in critical locations, such as particular university, shut it down. But they don't just shut it off.

Shutting it down would require the co-operation (forced or not) of a large number of people, some of whom are rather notorious for their dedication to keeping the net running and for their dislike of tyranny. Once shut down, large numbers of people would be sticking their heads out their front doors and checking with their neighbors to see what was happening. If the powers that be couldn't keep Watts under control in August 1965, they would have no chance with keeping the civilians in line with this.

I Damn sure hope the two of you are right.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

It is MUCH simpler than that (or a follow-on idea if the proles actually wake up), all they have to do is TURN IT [the internet] OFF.

It's too late, jtabeb.

TPTB can't turn off the Internet. Too much business. Too much communication. Too much entertainment. It's here to stay . .

I agree ... they don't just shut it off.

Shutting it down would require the co-operation (forced or not) of a large number of people, some of whom are rather notorious for their dedication to keeping the net running and for their dislike of tyranny.

I Damn sure hope the two of you are right.

My view has turned darker. They don't shut it down. They co-opt it.

What if Google, YouTube, Gmail, most of the mainstream and even secondary news, financial, political, economic and social websites were co-opted by U.S. intelligence and corptocracy elites?

Consider for instance NSA CIA Pentagon Super Surrveillance Society Big Brother Abuse Cyber Warfare Censorship or Google created by CIA NSA blocking Dissidents & Whistleblowers Government Cyber Warfare & Censorship (both brought to you courtesy of YouTube, a Google subsidiary .)

U.S. Intelligence is not shutting down the internet. It's using it.

Any "independent" website either keeps certain conspiratorial subjects off limits, or keeps discussion of such confined to some particular view, or if the site allows open discussion of taboo subjects and starts to gain any traction doing that, it is soon overrun by nutjobs (some of whom are wittingly or unwittingly doing the work of our Lord Masters the CIA and NSA ) that discredit and confuse any useful discussions.

Meanwhile, on all manner of topics that don't seriously matter to TPTB, the populace is distracted, entertained and divided into dozens of dissenting camps, while on key topics that do matter, dissent is discredited and the dominant theme of TPTB prevails.

Do a Google (argh - that's them again :eek for "Glenn Beck Debra Medina" for the latest episode of this propaganda war. Medina is getting too much traction in the Texas Governor's primary and is now being attacked by the main stream media lapdogs (in this case, by Glenn Beck, a lapdog with more street cred on the 'right' side of the street.)

Last week, it was Google teaming up with the NSA to counter a claimed cyber attack from China. See for example Google, NSA to team up in cyberattack probe. We'll likely never know what really went down there, but no self-respecting tin-foil-hat wearing cow is going to believe the cover story.

When push comes to shove and it's time for some serious crowd control, mass manipulation, call to arms or civil unrest suppression, the major internet megaphones, so managed, provide TPTB with another awesome weapon in their arsenal.

[raja]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

My view has turned darker. They don't shut it down. They co-opt it.

What if Google, YouTube, Gmail, most of the mainstream and even secondary news, financial, political, economic and social websites were co-opted by U.S. intelligence and corptocracy elites?

Consider for instance NSA CIA Pentagon Super Surrveillance Society Big Brother Abuse Cyber Warfare Censorship or Google created by CIA NSA blocking Dissidents & Whistleblowers Government Cyber Warfare & Censorship (both brought to you courtesy of YouTube, a Google subsidiary .)

U.S. Intelligence is not shutting down the internet. It's using it.

Any "independent" website either keeps certain conspiratorial subjects off limits, or keeps discussion of such confined to some particular view, or if the site allows open discussion of taboo subjects and starts to gain any traction doing that, it is soon overrun by nutjobs (some of whom are wittingly or unwittingly doing the work of our Lord Masters the CIA and NSA ) that discredit and confuse any useful discussions.

Meanwhile, on all manner of topics that don't seriously matter to TPTB, the populace is distracted, entertained and divided into dozens of dissenting camps, while on key topics that do matter, dissent is discredited and the dominant theme of TPTB prevails.

Do a Google (argh - that's them again :eek for "Glenn Beck Debra Medina" for the latest episode of this propaganda war. Medina is getting too much traction in the Texas Governor's primary and is now being attacked by the main stream media lapdogs (in this case, by Glenn Beck, a lapdog with more street cred on the 'right' side of the street.)

Last week, it was Google teaming up with the NSA to counter a claimed cyber attack from China. See for example Google, NSA to team up in cyberattack probe. We'll likely never know what really went down there, but no self-respecting tin-foil-hat wearing cow is going to believe the cover story.

When push comes to shove and it's time for some serious crowd control, mass manipulation, call to arms or civil unrest suppression, the major internet megaphones, so managed, provide TPTB with another awesome weapon in their arsenal.

My thought is that the Internet is not like TV, where you've got a dozen or so nationally accessible main channels for news . . . or newspapers, where there are a few major ones in each big city. Yes, in the old TV and newspaper world, TPTB could easily co-opt.

But the internet is so diverse, there would be no way to control it short of drastically reducing that diversity. For example, requiring every internet site or blogger to be "registered" and "approved" by some government clearing house. I don't think that would fly at this point . . . .

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

My thought is that the Internet is not like TV, where you've got a dozen or so nationally accessible main channels for news . . . or newspapers, where there are a few major ones in each big city. Yes, in the old TV and newspaper world, TPTB could easily co-opt.

But the internet is so diverse, there would be no way to control it short of drastically reducing that diversity. For example, requiring every internet site or blogger to be "registered" and "approved" by some government clearing house. I don't think that would fly at this point . . . .

While I'll agree that the internet is far more diverse than TV, so can't be co-opted in that simple and direct way, still from what I can tell the TPTB are making major and successful efforts to use the internet for their ends, including:

• observing and tracking popular perceptions of events, people, issues,
• identifying specific people or groups "of interest" for more specific monitoring, support or suppression, and
• adding their own amplifications, distortions, distractions and variations of "facts" and opinions.

TPTB bring enormous compute power to this task. The worlds largest single-system-image (SSI, I suspect at NSA) and largest cluster (Google) systems are I suspect both supporting these efforts. Since at least the work of Edward Bernays (e.g. Propaganda (1928)) the uses of mass psychology to monitor and shape public opinions, memes and controversies has been a major effort of TPTB. The Internet is a "target rich environment" for such work.

See also "The Century Of Self." It tells the story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses.



c1ue has been tracking some of these more explicit efforts in the area of "global warming" for us (his focus has been on the science, not the propaganda, but one can see evidence of propaganda here.) I follow rather closely some other "controversial" topics which the management of this present forum, iTulip, finds unproductive to consider here. Much can be done to confuse and divert important issues by those with enough resources.

For a couple more controversial links, consider http://www.propagandamatrix.com/ or http://www.wired.com/science/discove.../2006/05/70944 I have not been tracking propagandamatrix.com specifically prior to its showing up in a search I just did now, so I cannot tell if it is trustworthy. It does however display some of the topics and details to which I am referring here.

[Starving Steve]

Re: André Diederen, Global Resource Depletion: A roadmap towards sustainability?

One really needs to make a copy of to-day's (Feb 14, 2010) London Daily Mail, article about Prof. Phil Jones, East Anglia University Climate Research Centre, admitting that the world has not warmed since 1995 and claiming to have lost the data supporting man-made global warming. The article is entitled: "Climategate U-turn". When the Freedom of Information Act was used to force Prof. Jones to produce the relevant data supporting the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hypothesis, the good professor claimed to have lost the data in his office.