Poor Richard is an ex-IT Consultant living in exile from humanity at a secret location near Huntsville, AL USA Interests include:
* Peer-to-Peer (p2p) * Collaborative Economy * Open Government * Ecological Economics * Behavioral Economics * Neuroscience * Intentional Community * Human Nature * Saving the World * Social Entrepreneurs * Epistemology * Semantic Ontology * Information Quality Control * Experimental Psychology (XPsy) * Metacognition * General Utility
See on Scoop.it – Science and Sanity
All-new clinical studies. Unprecedented media coverage. Subjects treated in legal experimental psychedelic research sessions. More opportunities to connect with the psychedelic and medical marijuana research community than ever before. The evidence is clear: we are transforming medicine.
See on www.maps.org
[Some encouragement for amateurs and generalists --PR]
See on Scoop.it – Science and Sanity
We’ve shown that disfluency leads you to think more deeply, as I mentioned earlier, that it forms a cognitive roadblock, and then you think more deeply, and you work through the information more comprehensively. But the other thing it does is it allows you to depart more from reality, from the reality you’re at now.
See on www.edge.org
Libertarians, conservatives, and rich people are always saying government should be run more like a business. Here are some very businesslike ideas they probably won’t like.
I think society should encourage everyone to own a little bit of land and a modest domicile, free of tax. But since the public is the granting authority of ownership rights (and also the judicial and policing authority of those rights), our doctrine should be that there is an implied public easement on all land and structures that prohibits various kinds of public nuisance and environmental harm (actually this is already implied, but too narrowly).
Perhaps we should also have a federal rent on all land above a certain “homestead exemption” value, something like the Land Value Tax (LVT) proposed by Henry George. This would be an even stronger way to assert the public interest in all our land and resources. We should have a federal tax on non-renewable resource use, too, not just on carbon.
Monopoly’s Social cost. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I also like an idea I got from Nate Blair that the public can rent out patent and copyright monopolies instead of granting them free gratis, especially if the rent is in the form of a royalty on profits rather than an up-front cost. Since it is We the People who grant and guarantee patent and copyright rights, why should we not reserve some rights and benefits to the people?
In some cases we may want to buy back patent rights on medicines and other things that have a compelling social value to insure they will be available at or near the cost of production. As Nate writes:
Another great innovation would be for society to attempt to value the social benefit of an innovation, particularly in the field of medicine, and then make an offer that the innovator couldn’t refuse.For example, inventor of an HIV immunization could earn 10 billion in profit, but the social cost of monopolizing the treatment that some people cannot afford may equal 50 billion. Society could offer an award of 20 billion, like XPRIZE; accepting the prize would mean transferring the rights to society (to the commons) so that everyone could be treated at the marginal cost. The innovators get 10 billion more than they would have under the “free” (monopolized) market, and society has made a 30 billion dollar economic/societal profit. –Nate Blair
Patent rights on radio (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Related PRA 2.0 Posts
This initiative may represent the smartest thing the human race has done so far, of far greater importance than the Human Genome Project. I hope enough of us recognize it, because broad public participation will be crucial to guide this project in the public interest. There is no way to keep the ruling class from using science for evil, but we need to make the BRAIN Initiative and its publicly funded products a fully open, free, transparent and public domain body of work.
”As part of this planning process, input will be sought broadly from the scientific community, patient advocates, and the general public. The working group will be asked to produce an interim report by fall 2013 that will contain specific recommendations on high priorityinvestments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2014. The final report will be delivered to the NIH Director in June 2014. ” http://www.nih.gov/science/brain/index.htm
Please join me in taking every opportunity that arises to lobby for keeping the BRAIN Initiative and all other publicly funded research in the public domain of Open Science.
Follow new developments relating to the BRAIN Initiative and other advances in science and technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog and @whitehouseostp on Twitter.
PRA 2.0 Posts
A funny thing happened on the way to the forum…
Whenever there is activity on the blog here (comments, etc), I get a notification email from wordpress.com. The notification below says that I “liked” my own post, Leftovers, but I did not click the like button. Someone else did it using my identity. The strangest part is the line of text included in the notification email:
“You’re so vain. You probably think Leftovers is about you.”
So how does a witty comment get into a machine-generated wordpress.com notification email? Not only has my identity been hijacked, the wordpress.com notification system has been hacked, too.
Carly Simon, is that you?
PR
[The full email is reproduced below]
——————–
|
Leftovers
A trickle of tears is hard nursing
a can of recriminations, poor rations
and this spaghetti of conversation
slips through the fork of our best wishes
well, now that we’ve eaten our hearts out…
shall we leave the dirty dishes?
War on Poverty
We race to hell in shopping carts
down isles of strange inventions
voting with our Visa cards
and paying no attention
to the rising price of liberty–
safe and sound, we just hunker down
while the helicopter gunships fight our war on poverty.
PR
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Church of Reality
Critiques Of Libertarianism
Evolving Thoughts
P2P Foundation
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Stone
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