Reason: Is Longevity Research Inherently Immoral?

No.

Interestingly, some other researchers believe that ever dwindling telomeres cause cellular aging and argue that restoring telomeres could lengthen healthy lifespans. In fact, researchers at Harvard reported in 2010 that lengthening telomeres in genetically modified mice boosted their healthy lifespans.

...mostly included in today's document dump for the links, not the discussion.

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Nothing is sacred, nothing lasts. Nothing.

Reason online: Learning from Kodak's demise.

When given real choice, especially the choice to go elsewhere, consumers will drop even the most beloved of brands for options that enhance their experience and increase their autonomy. We have all witnessed and participated in this revolutionary transfer of loyalty away from those who tell us what we should buy or think and toward those who give us tools to think and act for ourselves. No corner of the economy, of cultural life, or even of our personal lives hasn't felt the gale-force winds of this change. Except government.

Think of any customer experience that has made you wince or kick the cat. What jumps to mind? Waiting in multiple lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Observing the bureaucratic sloth and lowest-common-denominator performance of public schools, especially in big cities. Getting ritually humiliated going through airport security. Trying desperately to understand your doctor bills. Navigating the permitting process at your local city hall. Wasting a day at home while the gas man fails to show up. Whatever you come up with, chances are good that the culprit is either a direct government monopoly (as in the providers of K–12 education) or a heavily regulated industry or utility where the government is the largest player (as in health care).

Read it (and read the following article).

...and have hope for the future. Things are changing, and it's hard to see changes when you're in the middle of them, and harder yet to see where the flow is taking you to.

...but the signs indicate, some place better.

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Walter Russell Mead has had on ongoing series of articles discussing a historical review of what he calls the blue social model. In effect, he's uniquely defining in a cohesive way, the lives we've been living (from public to personal, from business to government) the past 100 years or so (but particularly from the Great Depression/New Deal era to the present).

Mead is in effect, giving some semblance of overview to the collapse of our economic, political, and social systems. Moreso, that they're not really collapsing per se, but rather evolving. Life has come to and end, you might say, but life goes on. In essence, we live in "interesting times" (which is an old Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times"), and the blue model series of articles is an effort to articulate what is going on.

...and articulate the changes well.

The whole series is worth reading, but today he gives a great overview (the best so far); if it's the only one you read (or the one that hooks you into wanting to read them), read The Once And Future Liberalism at The American Interest.

One of the main reasons Americans have been so slow to recognize the collapse of the blue model is that the language we use to discuss and think about politics tends to disorganize our stock of understanding about our own society. Millions of Americans are conservatives and even reactionaries but think of themselves as "liberals”; at the same time, millions of genuine liberals and even radicals call themselves conservative. It's an unholy mess that calls desperately for a language intervention. Let us begin with an historic meditation on the "L” word.

...But it's not true. Neither aged version of liberalism can adequately address what Americans most want. In particular, neither can provide a new era of rising mass prosperity for the overwhelming majority of the American people. Nobody has a real answer for the restructuring of manufacturing and the loss of jobs to automation and outsourcing. As long as we are stuck with the current structures, nobody can provide the growing levels of medical and educational services we want without bankrupting the country. Neither "liberals” nor "conservatives” can end the generation-long stagnation in the wage level of ordinary American families. Neither can stop the accelerating erosion of the fiscal strength of our governments at all levels without disastrous reductions in the benefits and services on which many Americans depend.

There's more (much more) as it's a long article, and the above was taken somewhere near the end. You really should read it.

Oh. And as per his argument above about conservative viz liberal ...it's really true. We are liberals (in the traditional meaning of the term), though we call ourselves conservatives. (And most people calling themselves liberals, are actually conservatives.)

Very odd, that.

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Interesting read on the current state of cosmological thinking.

The Atlantic: What happened before the Big Bang?

In May of last year Stephen Hawking gave a talk for Google in which he said that philosophy was dead, and that it was dead because it had failed to keep up with science, and in particular physics. Is he wrong or is he describing a failure of philosophy that your project hopes to address?

Maudlin: Hawking is a brilliant man, but he's not an expert in what's going on in philosophy, evidently. Over the past thirty years the philosophy of physics has become seamlessly integrated with the foundations of physics work done by actual physicists, so the situation is actually the exact opposite of what he describes. I think he just doesn't know what he's talking about. I mean there's no reason why he should. Why should he spend a lot of time reading the philosophy of physics? I'm sure it's very difficult for him to do. But I think he's just . . . uninformed.

You got to have a lot of cojones to offer a critique of Hawking.

Read the whole thing; best pocket summary of the current state of what we know I've read for awhile.

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So. How about printing your next home? No, not printing the blueprints: printing the house itself.

...using a big robotic type printer.

Yes, there's already a model printer, and they're working on a full size one. Homes, of almost any imaginably useful and artistically satisfying shape, can be built in a day or two. 2800 sq ft homes. In a day or two. Using a LOT less workers.

Txchnologist: Printing a Home.

It can take anywhere from six weeks to six months to build a 2,800-square-foot, two-story house in the U.S., mostly because human beings do all the work. Within the next five years, chances are that 3D printing (also known by the less catchy but more inclusive term additive manufacturing) will have become so advanced that we will be able to upload design specifications to a massive robot, press print, and watch as it spits out a concrete house in less than a day. Plenty of humans will be there, but just to ogle.

...wonder what that will do to the construction industry? And to the skilled craftsmen who are currently employed in those skills? And to the skill-sets of those craftsmen?

We're going to reach a point, sooner rather than later, where robots of some sort are able to do most, if not all, of the work that humans currently do. Cheaper and faster than humans.

What do we do ...when we reach that point ...with the humans?

More specifically, where does the income come from to purchase the output and goods of the 99% robotic printers & factories, when the humans who are the recipients of those goods, have no jobs with which to earn the money with which to purchase those goods?

We're headed for a train wreck. Soon. Much, much sooner than we think.

IF ...if we try and keep the current socio-economic model of the value of human activity.

Something is going to have to give. Dunno what. But something.

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