Soon we will all live in trees again

http://dornob.com/eco-friendly-urban-center-sustainable-city-of-the-future/

High rise: sometimes a temporary stage on the way to utopia.

I've always been fascinated by high rise living. Not as a long term solution (that requires low density and low impact living), but as a temporary answer to the biggest problem: persuading the world to change. In order to do so we need to show economic benefit. We also have a lot of people wanting to live green, but they cannot afford the land under the present system. An obvious solution is to find a green society that can absorb large numbers of people into a small space, thereby creating wealth, and use that wealth to expand into lower density city forms. My land rent site is based on this principle: find a way to let people experiment with new societies, and the most attractive one will attract the most people, then outperform the rest as each person creates more wealth than they destroy.

Friends and gardens

The biggest problem with high rise is social interaction: when you don't know your neighbors then city blocks become hell on Earth (for the poor) or cages of mistrust (for the rich). A second problem is the distance between each person and any open green space. When I was a child I often toyed with the idea of being an architect, and would sketch out designs for tiered cities, where people live in high density towers yet everyone has a garden and passes many neighbours each day. It looks like this design firm had the same idea.

Why cities

As I said, this is not a long term solution, but it provides a practical way to solve overcrowding if we cannot afford much space. Many details would need to be worked out, but as a general principle cities allow each person to have a lower environmental impact because everything that can be shared is shared. For example, if you have neighbors above, below and to each side, then you don't need any heating in those directions. Economies of scale mean producing nutrition is minimally expensive. High rise mean unit land costs are minimized. Internal transport costs are minimized. Recycling can become more and more efficient due to economies of scale. Then once we can create all our food locally then, irony of ironies, cities become the greenest places to live.

Creating food within the city

For the same reason I am fascinated by vertical farms. And the obvious ideal is to combine the two - as the end of this article suggests: 

http://www.economist.com/node/17647627?story_id=E1_TSGQSGNS

Avatar becomes real
Taken to its extreme, every building becomes a skeleton surrounded by foliage, and we meet our neighbours as we walk along the branches. We are back to living in trees, except these are giant trees as in Avatar. In the future knowledge economy the heart of each tree would be its knowledge, its social networks, its wisdom. I am not  a great fan of Avatar - in the real world the movie could not work for numerous reasons (in particular, after defeating the Earth people, Earth would see Pandora as a massive threat and nuke it from orbit), but everyone living in giant wise trees makes a lot of sense.

Today I hit a rabbit with my car and killed it instantly.

I've been thinking of its life ever since. How it must have grown up and learned. How it saw the world. It was the centre of its universe.  I hope it didn't have any children.

God, religions, life after death, abortion, torture, animals, the future, and why the universe exists

These pages were previously part of AnswersAnswers.com, but I removed the links because they distracted from the economic focus. I think they are among the best things I have ever done, but they are only outlines of ideas, and I have no energy to expand on them.

God:
http://answersanswers.com/pantheism.html

Other stuff:
http://answersanswers.com/tough_questions.html

Google confirms it: I'm not like other people

You probably think I am exaggerating when I say there is nobody like me in the world. So here is a trivial, everyday example. Every day I Google topics that interest me, and come up with zero results. Every day. Here are some examples from today. Today I wanted to think logically, so naturally I began by questioning my premises. The obvious place to start is to question any hidden assumptions in the words used. Is it possible to use words without built-in assumptions? So I Googled:

So nobody has ever asked this question before. It's not just the way I word my questions - when I read in more depth and read lengthy essays I find that people really do not examine these ideas, not in the way that I do. Philosophy in particular has been a great disappointment to me.

So I gave up on esoterica and spoke to my hope-one-day-to-be-girlfriend instead. We spoke about ordinary stuff, what she was doing (going out to a pub with her friend). She was concerned that she and I have little in common - for example, I would not know what to do on a night out in a pub (apart from drink and talk, which can be done at home). So after she signed off I Googled:

O.K., so nobody has asked this question either. I considered working on my game some more, but it's another of those projects that gets blank looks from others - it isn't like any existing game so people don't know how to relate to it. So instead I went back to my previous topic, the question of logic. I decided to investigate assumptions on my own. Basic logic begins with a hypothesis - an assumption. I wondered if there was any related term that was logically less suspect. So I visited synonym.com:

These are just three examples of zero results, I could add to this list every day.

Intellectually I am alone, but it's OK to be alone in one or two areas as long as you connect with people in other areas. What about emotionally? I think I blogged already about the choices people make. (Follow up 1, follow up 2). What about socially? I may have mentioned about finding a site devoted to lonely people and finding I was the odd one out. But I have my family around me, right? Yes, my family who's life revolves around a church I rejected, at the cost of my marriage, and their deepest wish is for me to change.

Maybe I should forget all the serious stuff and just take it easy. Go shopping for a pair of shoes perhaps? I think I mentioned on FaceBook about the problems of finding affordable shows for very large feet, so let's not awaken those painful memories. Or maybe I should lose myself in my hobbies? In every case, without exception, I make web sites on topics that interest me and find that nobody else in the whole world has done anything like it before. It becomes tiring.

I could give more examples from dating ("no matches in your area, defaulting to state wide" then no matches there either), or my career, or my current religious beliefs, or my goals, or any other area you choose to mention.

People sometimes say to me "you are not really alone" or "we all feel that way" as they laugh with their significant other and chat with their friends. They have no idea. They do not even have the vaguest notion of the beginning of an idea of what it is like to be different.

This is my hero, Grigori Perelman. He solves the world's hardest problems, and lives in a run down St Petersburg apartment with his mother. I am sure he would LOVE to have friends, especially a girlfriend, but he's smart enough to realize it cannot be. As for me, I'm not as smart as him so I still hold out hope.

My favorite quote, about why he turned down a million dollar prize for his work:  "I know how to control the universe. So tell me, why should I run for a million?”

Thinking takes ages

I spent the last few months achieving very little outwardly, but working on very complicated ideas - like what should I do with my life at this crossroads? (This is very complicated because there are a lot of unknown variables.) The time spent  will be worth it- a single good decision can save years of wasted work - but still, months to make decisions. It's hard work!

Teletubbies

Some of these posts may appear superficial, but they all have a serious side. Satire and observational humor are ways to make serious points. This is one of those posts - the serious point I'm making is left as an exercise for the reader.

Yesterday a friend mentioned the teletubbies, and reminded me of something I wrote a few years ago, entitled "The Eloi To Be." I can't find the original, but here is a summary.

There are two great novels of the future, that stand head and shoulders above the rest. George Orwell's 1984, set in the near future, and H.G.Wells' The Time Machine (TTM) set in the distant future. The Teletubbies (TTB) is the bridge between the two eras:

• Obedience: it begins with crude propaganda (1984), evolves into pipes that give orders that are instantly obeyed (TTB), and finally we have a completely compliant and non-curious populace (TTM).
• The landscape starts as bombed buildings (1984), becomes underground bomb shelters with nature reclaiming the open spaces (TTB), and eventually nature completely takes over the surface (TTM).
• The underclass of workers starts as metaphorically underground (1984), begin to move literally underground (TTB) and ends up deep underground (TTM).
• Workers and elites (1984) become noonoos and teletubbies (TTB), and eventually morlocks and eloi (TTM). Perhaps tubby custard is soylent green?
• Telescreens: they start as crude stand alone boxes on the wall (1984). Technology evolves until they are wearable (TTB), and finally they are not needed because Earth is a fake paradise and all curiosity is dead (TTM).
• I could go on, about the regression to childhood, the architectural styles, the importance of bedtime, the significance of flowers, etc., but you get the picture. 

A love that lasts when the stars grow cold

I'm a romantic. I believe in love that lasts forever. But not in any metaphorical or faith based way. I got proof.

Who am I? My physical atoms? No, they get recycled constantly, like water in a river. The real me is the river itself, the genes and the memes. When you love someone those genes and memes are mixed and the river continues stronger through the next regeneration.

Some of me, some of my genes, can be traced back to the days when the Earth was new born, and the first life fought to survive a burning hell (the Hadean period), and won. Those winning genes are still alive in my body, 3.8 billion years later! It's a proud heritage, and the love that creates the next generation will similarly last forever. These same genes, and their loved ones, will be holding hands in 900 million years as technology allows us to leave the then uninhabitable earth. These same genes, still in love, will be mixing and remixing and come back to visit the Earth in 5 billion years, sitting on a rock watching as the sun expands and burns off the remains of the planet's surface. By then our memes, through evolved technology, will have created new worlds. Those memes are being created now.

As we raise the children we love, we pass our ideas on, and the best of those ideas last forever.

As we hold children and cuddle them and give them confidence and help them with homework, we are ensuring that our love - expressed in their genes and memes - will still be together and loving and pro-creating long after the current stars grow cold. Love we share now, the things we do, really do last forever. And I MEAN forever.

We all live on a giant water balloon

When you blow up a balloon the skin is something like 0.1mm thick, and the balloon is around 250mm across. Or a ratio of 1/2500. Our planet's crust is only 5km thick on the ocean floor, and the planet is about 13,000km - or a ratio of 1/2500. Under that thin skin our planet is mostly liquid. We live on a giant water balloon!

Scientists think the moon was formed when another giant water balloon hit this one, and a bit splashed off. Somebody very very big was having a party in those early days, and I'm glad it's over now.

I don't know about you, but I won't be doing much digging in the garden for a while, just in case I go too far and burst the ground. Or if I do have to dig I'm going to hold my breath first and tie myself to the shed just in case.

Forty foot rhubarb

Trees amaze me. They're basically little plants, like bracken and rhubarb, but bigger. Crazy big. Forty foot rhubarb! It's like being in The Land Of The Giants. Whenever I'm among trees I expect some giant foot to walk past and step on me.

Why do we hate getting money? (2)

I have a job. And the government fines me for working - they call it tax. They also fine my company for the crime of employing me, and if I make anything to sell, there's an automatic fine of 20 percent, to discourage us from doing it again. They have another way of preventing us earning money: the smartest people in the company are kept busy filling out horribly complex and pointless tax forms.

It has the desired effect: all these fines add up to around 40 percent of any money earned. Which means if you have a $100 job to do you can't do it unless it makes an instant profit of $67 (because 167 - 40% = 100). Obviously most work does make such a huge instant profit, so most work cannot be done.

For centuries economists have been telling them to tax other things instead of work (like taxing land for example, to stop people using more than they need), as this would let the extra low profit work be done, making more money for everyone. But the government hates the idea of making money. I don't know why, but I think it's because they are stark raving mad.

Why do we hate getting money? (1)

I don't understand immigration control. If someone wants to come here and work, that means they create more wealth than they use (otherwise nobody would hire them). So more workers means more money. Economic migrants are basically saying "we want to give you money, please let us, pretty please!" And we say "we don't want your money, we have too much already. Go back to where you came from."

I get how we don't have many jobs, but that's our choice. The government hates jobs, that's why they have heavy fines for anyone who creates jobs or does work of any kind. I'll blog about that next.

Why do houses have roofs?

I've always wondered this. People pay a fortune for land - thousands of dollars for a tiny area - then they only use half of it. Go to Google Earth and zoom in, and you'll see. Half of a typical property is garden - an area that the people actually use and grow stuff, and half of it is roof. They just cover it with slate and leave it. Why not just put the garden there, and then you only need to pay for half the land?

People work insane hours, have gigantic mortgages, get trapped in a rat race, all so they can pay for land that they just uglify and leave. People are mad. I can't see how anyone can complain about land costs or not having enough space when half the land they buy is just covered in slate and ignored.

Love? What's that? Almost nobody wants it.

I spent the last couple of months on dating sites. And found one or two sweet, genuine people, but they are rare. I did notice something interesting though: you can work out the cash value placed on love, and it's not very high.

Love is clearly less valuable then money. Try setting up a profile and saying "I have no money" and see how many hits you get. You can promise eternal fidelity and servitude, but it ain't cash, and that's what counts.

Love clearly has some value (people still ask for it) but how much? the typical dater will only look for someone within 50 miles of their home. I.e. within commuting distance. I mentioned to one person that I admired her profile, but lived a long way from her, and she literally laughed in my face.

It is inconceivable to most people that they, or a lover, would ever consider moving for love. Why? How much does it cost to change a job? You risk having to trade down to something less well paid  (but you might be lucky and get a similar or better job), but it probably costs something like ten percent of your income on average. And most love affairs are traded in after 5 years or so.

Paris and Helen?  Eloise and Abelard? Anthony and Cleopatra? Clearly idiots. They travelled too far, paid way too much. The true value of love is roughly equal to a second hand car, and just as disposable.

How rich countries vacuum the life out of poor countries

How closed borders kill people, and also make us poorer:

In Richland, a typical worker earns $10 per hour.
In Poorland, a typical worker earns $1 per hour.
A typical product takes 10 hours to make.
Poorland works 100 hours to buy 1 Richland product.
Richland works 1 hour to buy 1 Poorland product.

So whenever they trade, Richland sucks value out of  Poorland at 100 times the rate that Poorland can get value out of Richland. ONE HUNDRED TIMES! Poorland never has a chance. Anything of any worth gets sucked out, the people stay poor, some of them starve, they die of easily preventable diseases, and so on. Richland is just a giant vacuum cleaner sucking the life out of Poorland.

Obviously the answer is for the good folks of Poorland to come and work in Richland: with superior technology they become more productive, and so THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF WEALTH CREATED INCREASES. It's up to the government to allocate this wealth so that everyone benefits, especially those who temporarily lose jobs.

But instead of letting everyone benefit, Richland puts up big fences at the borders, and watch as their poor neighbors starve to death. Then we maybe spend maybe 0.5% of our budget on "aid" and see ourselves as being sooooooo generous.

Bottom line: we hate making money, we love bleeding people to death, it's much more fun.

Yes, one person like you really can change the world

Everyone says that one person cannot change the world, but why not? The world is based on incredibly stupid rules. All you have to do is point out a better alternative.

For example, one of my interests is tax. Taxing work is stupid because it reduces the amount of work that can be done profitably, thus making everyone poorer. Taxing other stuff instead would make everyone much richer, even if the same amount of tax was paid. Such a change would benefit absolutely everyone in a massive way. Economists have been pointing this out for centuries, but nobody has the courage to listen.

The world is full of stupidity like that - rules that hurt absolutely everyone (especially law makers) and can be easily changed. To change the world you just have to be the little kid who says "the emperor has no clothes."

Does a single honest person exist?

Diogenes of Sinope used to carry a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He would still be looking today. The problem is not that people deliberately lie (that causes cognitive dissonance) but that people do not care whether what they believe is true or not.


How many people have thought through their beliefs? How many can trace their ideas to pure logic? How many people even try? Sure, philosophers specialize in narrow areas, but where is the general theory of everything? Maybe it is hard to find, but who is even looking for it? Who cares?


Take economics for example. Read any economics text book. You will find thousands of pages of anecdotes, and logic with gaps - i.e. major assumptions are not traced back to first principles. 


Nobody is even trying. Many economists make a lot of money and have high intelligence, but they don't spend their free time in fixing their intellectual house of cards, they spend their free time enjoying their wealth. Truth is much less important to them than the accumulation and enjoyment of money. The same can be said for every occupation on Earth.

"We cannot fix the big problems." Oh really?

Hundreds of years ago, war and starvation were common in every nation. Now they are eradicated in half the world (rich countries still sponsor wars in distant lands, but those lands had their own wars anyway, just as ours once did). Most of this change has happened within the last century. So clearly we can fix the big problems if we want to.

Often it is trivially easy to fix problems. We could solve most of the world's urgent problems for a tiny, tiny fraction of what we spend on killing. But we choose not to.

"it's not my fault that people are starving"

People don't get involved in solving global poverty because they say "I did not cause it."

First, how do we know that? We are voters and money users in the most powerful nations on earth, devoted to our self interest above every other consideration. Our decisions have always had major influence on the shape of the world, yet we insist that we do more good than harm to all other nations. How do we know?

Second, that is irrelevant. We are not evil because we caused poverty, we are evil because we could save individual lives, at no cost to ourselves (e.g. by spending less on getting fat), but we choose not to.

"it's not my fault"

The whole world is evil, but each person says "it is not my fault." Each person chooses to let children die in order to get a chocolate bar, but their choice is not their fault. Clearly the concept of "choice" and "fault" need to be rewritten. If deciding A instead of B is not a choice, what is it? If choosing death is not a faulty choice, what is?

The whole world is evil

Here is a thought experiment. You have one dollar. You have a choice: buy a chocolate bar, or save a child's life.

What will you do? Save a life and miss that chocolate, or have that chocolate and let the child die?

Most of us are faced with that choice every day. We have money, and we could spend it on charities to feed the starving, or we could spend it on stuff that makes us fat. Every day we choose death several times. Because of our choices, children die who would otherwise live.

Therefore we are all (or nearly all) evil.

It's OK, you are not the only one.

First post.

Hello.

I set up this blog as a lone beacon. It sits here broadcasting its message in the hope that one other person on Earth will hear and recognize the call.

The background image is "Noche de luna llena - Full moon night" by *L*u*z*A* (Flickr, Creative Commons)