12 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
A Lack of Material Resources Contributes to the Decline o...
First and foremost, the price of war has gone up dramatically. The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms.
Secondly, while the price of war soared, its pro 1 
notes
notes12 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Decline of US Religion Between 2007 and 2014
To be sure, the United States remains home to more Christians than any other country in the world, and a large majority of Americans – roughly seven-in-ten – continue to identify with some branch of the Christian faith.1 But the major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally mass...
1 09 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
Two Kinds of Societal Collapse
Running the model in dierent scenarios produces two kinds of collapses, either due to scarcity
of labor (following an inequality-induced famine) or due to scarcity of Nature (depletion of natural
resources). We categorize the former case as a Type-L (Disappearance of Labor) Collapse and
the latter as a Type-N collapse (Exhaustion of Nature). In a Type-L collapse, growth of the
Elite Population strains availability of resources for the Commoners. This causes decline of the
Commoner Population ... 1 notes
notes19 JUL 2014 by ideonexus
The Decline in Reading is Because of Limited Time
With e-books becoming more dominant and less money coming into the industry, the bookstores die (they're already highly marginal now). With bookstores' death, so go the publishers (after all, any established author will make more money from self-publishing and now the *one* (incredibly important) thing the publishers offer - shelf space - is gone).
With publishers gone, we all essentially become slush pile readers. The books are nearly free, but the constraint is *time*, not money, and with ... 1 notes
notesNot money, time is a limited resource.
03 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
The Danger of Scientific Ignorance in a Science-Based Civ...
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when we're a
service and information economy; when nearly all the key
manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries;
when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few,
and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the
issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own
agendas or knowledgeably question those In authority; when,
clutching our crystals and r... 1 notes
notesWe are more reliant on science than ever before, but we are also most disdainful of it.
30 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
We Should Think of Ourselves as Atoms
we should consider ourselves but as atoms of organized matter, whose pleasure or whose pain, whose existence in a state of organization, or whose non-existence in that state, is a matter of no importance in the laws and operations of Nature; we should view ourselves with the same feelings, as we view the leaf which rises in the spring, and falls in the autumn, and then serves no further purpose but to fertilize the earth for a fresh production; we should view ourselves but as the blossoms of ... 1 notes
notesWe are like the leaves on trees that are green for a season and then return to the Earth.
14 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
The Implications of a Facebook Bankruptcy
One reason companies like Facebook should be interested in what I am proposing is that planning a regulation regime is better than morphing involuntarily into a dull regulated utility, which is what would probably happen otherwise. Suppose Facebook never gets good enough at snatching the “advertising” business from Google. That’s still a possibility as I write this. In that event, Facebook could go into decline, which would present a global emergency.
It’s not an outlandish scenario....Folksonomies: social media
Folksonomies: social media
1 notes
notesPeople would lose their friends, contacts, and much online history.
30 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
The Past and Who Has Access to It
What we know about the past—and who has access to such knowledge—has changed dramatically with each such change. The changes run far deeper than the mere proliferation of data points. As written records of large estates held in monasteries in France achieved legal and social dominance, the role of women as the tellers of the past fell into decline (Geary, 1994): The technological and the social were deeply intertwined. The outcome was that different kinds of records were kept. With the in... 1 notes
notesThe past was once only available through memory, then only available to those who had access to records, and now available to everyone.
04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Online Shopping Replaces Sales People
During the Great Recession, nearly 1 in 12 people working in sales in America lost their job, accelerating a trend that had begun long before. In 1995, for example, 2.08 people were employed in “sales and related” occupations for every $1 million of real GDP generated that year. By 2002 (the last year for which consistent data are available), that number had fallen to 1.79, a decline of nearly 14 percent.Folksonomies: employment automation
Folksonomies: employment automation
1 Everytime you purchase something online, that's something you didn't purchase from a retail clerk.
28 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Decline of Science in Media
A 2008 analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that if you tune for five hours' worth of cable news you will probably catch only one minute's coverage of science and technology—compared with ten minutes of "celebrity and entertainment," twelve minutes of "accidents and disasters," and "26 minutes or crime." As for newspapers, from 1989 to 2005 the number featuring weekly science or science-related sections shrank by nearly two-thirds, from ninety-five to thirty-four. Thes... 1 notes
notesNewspapers killing their science sections and television showing less and less science content.
