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Thoughts:

The conduction band
 - The natural state of people is like an insulator: there is no 
conduction band, so people can't move around.  Modern society is like a 
conductor: people are stuck in a conduction layer, and have both 
mobility and resistance.  Above a certain line, provided one doesn't 
increase one's spending, one gains exponential growth, and like a 
superconductor, scarcity is no longer a problem, and one need not work.
This state is stable for individuals, but also if a society were to have 
nearly everyone in this superconducting state, this would be stable, 
because nearly all 
work necessary for making and distributing food and energy can be 
automated, so as a result, there is very little work that need be done,
and the work that need be done can be done by the young, who would 
quickly retire.  
This state is metastable, in the sense that human genetics take an 
adverserial position to such non-scarcity, and thus overbreeding, the 
resulting warfare for food, and demands for resource equity...like high 
temperatures threaten to break up the superconductivity, and thus far have 
prevented people in Western culture from quitting the conduction band and 
hence their jobs.  Because societies with renewable energy and technology 
can plausibly be made stable without exploiting other societies, it is 
ethically imperative to reject the idea of either worldwide resource 
equity, or 
uncontrolled breeding.  Breeding cannot be feasibly controlled, 
therefore, resource equity must be rejected, on utilitarian grounds.

From a long-term view, there is no 
reason that if 
non-scarcity is viable that scarcity is ethically preferable, hence it is 
ethically imperative that we  
all work to bring everyone to the superconduction band, while working 
against excessive breeding, decline in resources available per person, war 
of the starving many against the few, and other genetic threats to 
non-scarcity.  We have had 4 billion years of scarcity, living like 
animals, starving and always pursuing each last scrap of food with every 
waking moment, and there 
is no reason that we shouldn't try to abolish this situation, by working 
together against a naive utilitarianism that demands equal happiness among 
all, to the 
detriment of our successors, who would live, starving, under despots in 
the future. 
Existing capitalistic Western social rules are sufficient to establish 
non-scarcity.  
  We can and should work towards a time-corrected 
utilitarianism, which rejects both work and the idea of resource equality, 
and requires us to be more ethical by saving most of our money, to ensure 
that we leave the world in a better state than we found it, with less 
scarcity.

 - Red line (zero assets), below is negative exponential growth,
   black line, above that is positive exponential growth.
   If saving X% of after-tax income, can retire in Y years, by
   moving above the black line; show calculus derivation.  Why then
   does everyone work?  It has to do with our origin as fish: watch
   fish closely, all they ever do is eat.  Resource contention.
   Same with dogs; they're always hungry.  In fact, that's the natural
   state of all organisms except humans: breed until the environment
   is saturated, then fight over the resources that are never enough
   to go around.  Z% of people in the world have issues getting food.
   The Middle East: example of resource contention.

   Why does everyone not hang out above the black line?  Psychology:
   people are hardwired to be right at the red line, or even below, near
   the point of food scarcity.  Creditors and advertisers in the United 
   States base their entire business on the idea that people are hardwired 
   to prefer short-term, "consumptive" types of satisfaction such as
   eating; and thus such behaviors while genetically designed for survival
   are ironically among the leading causes of death.  Think of it this 
   way: if your genes were up to date, you'd fear butter, unrefined foods,
   and cars, but not snakes.  Short term 
   pleasure: in an uncertain environment, use up the resources you can
   get now.  Averse to the black line: 99% of people are in the
   conduction band, so life is conducted in the conduction band.
   When people don't actively think about these bands, their default,
   subconscious hardwiring says "you have a job, enough money, so use
   more resources; why save?"  So most people aren't actively aware of 
   these two bands, and the thousands of constraints that arise in daily 
   life due to the two bands, so without being cognizent of these hard
   constraints, they can't think about where they want to be on the
   lines and plot their course appropriately, and are instead of 
   being their own captain are thrown about at random by various forces in 
   the world.

   Plot out where people are on the band, using statistics, split
   into different plots grouped by income.

   Work is barbaric.  Why?  It causes people to be dumb, and satisfy
   the sort of food-mentality of the conduction band, i.e. do work,
   so as to consume food, or consume software, or consume books, or
   consume corporate entertainment assets, or consume by hoarding
   possessions.  People are probably both hardwired and conditioned to
   do this consumption, but it's profoundly anti-intellectual,
   and prevents the growth of the person and achievement of arete,
   or excellence, and development of genius.  The mentality of
   many people in the conduction band is little different from the fish:
   everything is seen as a product, and consumptive.  This is a great
   loss, individually, culturally, and economically.  Of course it is
   possible to live within the conduction band while rejecting the 
   prevailing attitudes thereof, for example, any musician, artist, or 
   scientist who will take a pay cut to do work they love is consciously
   choosing a higher calling over the fight for consumptives found in 
   the conduction band.  However, I'm convinced that the behavior of
   people in the conduction band is structural and unavoidable, 
because it arises due to genetics and unexamined impulses, and so
   these people will always be "sailing against the wind."  It's no
   accident that everyone around you is a consumer idiot: this is the
   form that follows the function of genetics and the band where people
   are limited to "doing work" rather than being free of scarcity, and
   always doing their preference.  Interesting questions then arise:
   Must the conduction band exist?  Can everyone be pushed on top of the 
   conduction band?  What's the optimal long-term strategy for doing so?
   Is this ethically preferable for a society?  As an individual,
   is it preferable to be in the band or on top of it?

   The existence of the black line can't be disputed; it varies by
   spending, but as long as lots of people want to hang out below the
   red line and work constantly to stay afloat while undergoing negative
   exponential growth, people above the black line can exploit these
   people and gain positive exponential growth.  One can also invest:
   S&P 500.

   Z% of people hang out in the conduction band, therefore life is
   conducted in this band.  This is rather limiting for our culture,
   as for example the Greeks thought work was barbaric, and only fit
   for slaves.  Yet nearly everyone in our culture spends a large
   portion of their time fighting up or down slightly in the conduction
   band: a lot of trivial O(1) problems that people spend years of 
   their lives laboring for would completely go away if not so many
   people hung out in the conduction band.  The Greeks thought that
   educated people should not only not work, but should devote their
   lives to the higher pursuits, such as philosophy, poetry, writing
   of plays, the liberal arts.  People in our culture put the cart
   before the horse: they try to make money, and only belatedly
   do they realize that they
   are laboring to create materials only of interest to barbarians,
   i.e. the consumers, the majority, the people who hang out in the
   conduction band and who are hostile to every value of
   civilization except that which immediately makes them money.
   Everyone works all the time, and must exist in a base form of
   existence, laboring like an animal, simply because they choose
   the red band.
   The red band people are like the fish.

   So far, positive claims only.  The lines exist; some anarchists may
   want to destroy the lines, communists might want to narrow the band,
   capitalists expand the band, but those are normative.

   My personal preference is that I want to be paid to be alive, rather
   than paying for the priviledge of being alive.  The fundamentals
   are that if you fall below the red line and don't have support, you
   die.  That has been explored for 4 billion years of evolution; it's
   barbaric.  The black line is at least worth exploring, because it's 
   largely uncharted terrain.  If you get high enough above the black
   line, then when you reproduce, you have "trust fund babies," and
   for some reason, these babies often turn out apathetic, but that's
   not a fundamental problem, it's just an issue of character.

   How many people can hang out above the black band?  If people stop
   breeding so much and as a result having red line resource contention
   issues (the cause of much war, class envy), then conceivably, everyone.
   Most fundamentally necessary work has already been automated; for
   example, in the U.S., the so-called "service economy" is just a 
   mechanism for wealth redistribution from the productive members of
   society to everyone else, and it's only necessary because the U.S.
   people actively choose the conduction band.  In previous days, 
   the hordes who bred a lot would kill off the rich or competing 
   groups and take their
   resources; this is probably why people are so hardwired for violence,
   and it's quite difficult to explain all the wars in human history
   any other way, modulo Occam's razor.  Improved technology
   allows the rich to fight off the many, and so the genes of those who 
   breed too much can't game the system any more and force everyone to
   live at the red line.

   Naturally, people above the black line will want to work, because it
   allows them to help both society and themselves, be social, help the
   development of culture, science, or technology, or simply work doing
   services to make other peoples' lives richer.  In my view, work is
   good, as long as people choose it; it's only scarcity and the resulting 
   forced labor that is bad.

   I think it's unethical to reproduce when one is below the black band.
   The argument here is that one is passing on a very fundamental problem
   (scarcity) to one's children, and leaving them in the conduction band
   or at the red band.  As one gains more wealth, one generally has more 
   choices, but particularly, if one is paid to be alive, the costs of
   getting more education or changing careers or jobs are practically nil;
   a person above the black line is like a water strider, free of
   constraints, with ease of movement between nations, while people below 
   the red line are like those who are trapped in quicksand, e.g.
   immigrant laborers, who are always just fighting to stay alive.
   To have children who are close to the red line is to set them up to
   do lots of labor simply to get out of the quicksand; their life is
   lessened as a result, and they cannot pursue arete.

   It's a deplorable situation that anyone in any social system must 
   be in or below the conduction band.  It's sad that so many peoples
   lives are lessened simply because their genes want scarcity.
   Solutions throughout history for allowing non-scarcity to develop
   are imposing slavery, or respecting wealth
   and personal property.  The enslavement of people who haven't incurred 
   debts to society (in the form of crime or monetary debts) is blatantly 
   unethical; for people who have incurred debts, historical solutions to 
   this problem are to throw the offenders in prison and force them to
   do nothing, force the offenders to work, or some combination thereof.
   (The latter usually falls under the category of imprisonment or forced
   labor.)

   I've argued that it's ethically preferable for everyone to be past the
   black line.  Is it possible to get into this situation by taking only
   ethical actions?  Sure.  The development of science and technology,
   renewable resources, and awareness that reproduction should be limited
   are self-sustaining mechanisms which allow a society
   to continue to be high in the conduction band or near non-scarcity,
   without exploiting any other society.  A isolated developed nation 
   could easily move to non-scarcity, and remain there indefinitely, so 
   long as these forms are followed.  Those who breed uncontrollably in
   undeveloped nations are commonly seen as the exploited, however, 
   they are unintentionally -- through no conscious fault of their 
   own -- closer to exploiters: they are following a genetic
   strategy designed to use up resources and exploit concentration of 
   resources by waging war.

   Respecting wealth and personal property
   allows pockets of non-scarcity to develop, which are defensible against
   the predatory nature of people who breed uncontrollably.  There is
   nothing ethically desirable about people starving to death.  The only
   long term strategy to prevent famine is to fight overpopulation and
   unnecessary wars caused by resources constraints; the only way to do
   this ethically is to educate people that the only historically viable
   method of achieving non-scarcity, or even a viable conduction band
   (rather than everyone hanging out at the red line), is to follow
   the values of the developed nations, and in particular, nations which
   have few people who need work.
 
   Thus, all 
   people should be educated about Western concepts, and in particular 
    so-called "capitalistic" concepts as the development of private 
   property and personal rights, which help prevent arbitrary 
   confiscation of resources.  The irrational preference of much of the
   political left for equal distribution of resources, energy 
   conservation (Footnote: often couched in the rhetoric of "preserving 
   the environment," which is an entirely different subject.  Energy
   per person should be high and continually rising in a society with
   little scarcity; if energy is "saved" naively, this could easily
   result in the available energy funds for each person falling as
   population rises, so that everyone ends up in mud huts, barbaric
   again.), welfare for those who breed beyond their means, or any
   other strategy which subsidizes rapid growth in population without
   a corresponding growth in personal wealth, or attacks concentrations
   of wealth among those who prefer non-scarcity; all of these liberal
   ideas should be rejected as uninformed optimistic short term strategies
   with disasterous long term consequence: increase in scarcity.
   Likewise, the conservative ideas that wars should be waged to control
   non-renewable resources such as oil are foolish, because renewable
   resources, or fission or fusion must be used to have a stable
   technologically advanced, non-scarce society even in the next few
   decades.  Finally, utilitarianism should never be applied blindly,
   and especially one should never only consider the happiness of people
   who are currently alive, as the default preference for genes for
   billions of years and the majority of people who are alive at this
   moment is a situation of horrible, barbaric scarcity.
   

   such as 
   allows non-scarcity to develop, about the conduction band, the
   general desirability of being past the black line, that is is 
   possible to do this ethically, and the dangers of reproduction.

   Joules per person per year, electrical power of GDP.  Show that 
capitalistic countries have been on the right path.  Protecting the 
environment is important, but increasing energy per person is not 
antagonistic to that goal per se, and only becomes so when the problem of 
overbreeding is not addressed.

  Conflicts of this view with religious ideas, basic ethics such that one 
should save a starving man.  The solution here is that one need not let a 
man starve, but rather that one should reward with large amounts of food 
per person large numbers of people who are often hungry, and 
especially one should not make such food be an oscillating 
function, because the consequences with peoples' genetic hardwiring for 
short term rewards are horrible: in times of plenty, they quickly 
reproduce, but then not having an economy, when the food goes away due to 
military conflicts over food and other critical resources among such 
people, widespread starvation results.  It's like playing cat and mouse 
with peoples' genetic hardwiring: it's just cruel.  And it only comes 
about because people think too much in the short-term: there's a famine 
now, so fix it by throwing food at the problem; all long term solutions 
are rejected by the powers that be.


The Universe is programmable
 - Life is information; people run code, and people could change their
   code if they wanted; both viruses and computers are pseudo-alive in
   the sense that they maintain information, but don't reproduce except
   through their hosts.  Entropy is a measure of life; the materials with
   the least amount of life are minerals, or solids, liquids or gases
   with little entropy; as an organism dies and is decomposed it decreases
   in entropy and eventually is absorbed into plants and increases in
   entropy again.  There's no fundamental reason for minerals to just sit
   around and do nothing; one could for example throw some multivitamins
   into a bottle of soap and reconfigure the result into a mouse.
   Liberate soap!

Theoretical biology
 - Constraints: oxygen, temperature, water and food input and output,
   conservation of blood vessel flux, mineral propagation to bones,
   information theory, ...
   goal: describe parameter space for living organisms.

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<h2>Writings</h2>

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