Two kinds of people who unite to do things

There seems to be at least two kinds of people who unite to do things.

One type unites to get the group to attack targeted others, so as to "win" something; that is, to deprive specific others so the united group can have all the goodies.

The other type unites to get people to build mutually beneficial things together, and/or responsibly maintain those mutually beneficial things, long-term, as part of the larger system of life.

Adding sawdust as a source of food fiber

Several decades ago, I recall reading about a company that had started adding sawdust to its white bread, so as to provide the fiber needed to help digestion processes. But there was subsequent articles proclaiming public uproar over having to pay money for sawdust in bread, since it had no nutritional value; and so the product was removed from the market. Yet even today people have lots of difficulty in obtaining enough fiber to help their digestion process work correctly.

Looking back on that, I'd think it would require some inspection and processing attention to provide "food grade" sawdust (or similar ground-up woody plant fiber) as a source of fiber in our food supply. And before that, some research in depth into the long term effects of having some sawdust in some of our food: does it really function as well as natural food fiber and does it have any harmful side effects in long term use. I suspect that in the early human diet that shaped our digestion systems, we got lots of woody plant fiber eaten along with our food sources, such as stems of berries and incidental wood fragments gathered with grains.

Of course, it is also said that white bread already has little nutritional value. So adding sawdust to it would not change that much. Bleaching sawdust to make it white for white bread use might be a problem, but maybe done like the bleaching of white flour is done. The already more nutritious whole wheat and multigrain breads would probably not need bleached sawdust.

Of course, I personally have a gluten intolerance condition; but I recall in my college days of having to live on white bread at times due to low finances. Sawdust in that bread would have at least kept it from getting stuck in the digestive tract. I know better now, of course, than to depend on white bread for nutrition.

Sawdust might not be the only source of digestion-system function enhancing plant fiber. Stalks of grain-bearing crops might be appropriate too, for example.

I currently mainly depend on eating canned black beans for my food fiber. But as we all know, beans has a socially unwelcome side effect. Living like a hermit, it does not matter much for me; but that might be an issue for the general population. I doubt that adding sawdust to some types of processed foods would cause that side effect, however, and if it indeed provides the proper working of the digestion system that is proclaimed about needed fiber content of meals, it sounds worth looking into again.

Putting properly treated sawdust or similar indigestible ground-up plant fiber into breads, pastries, cereals, processed meats, mashed potatoes, even some soups, might be really helpful. And not expensive.

How did he do it

Much of my life I have been trying to fill in the answers to questions that have come up in my life. One question that appeared about 1974 - a year or two after my former wife left me - and life's events have not yet provided an answer explaining the event. Am now getting up in years and am not likely to have an experience at this point that will answer the question, and so maybe someone reading this blog will leave a comment with an explanation.

I was part of a church singles group, still struggling with my the situation of my former wife ditching me long before that, existing since then in lonely despair, and was in desperate need of a girlfriend; yet - unknown to me at the time - I had Asperger's social incompetency that made it very hard to initiate conversations, necessary in the singles world. I was largely dependent on others providing introductions.

At the time of the subject event, I was attending a church's single's group's party, where we were often instructed about life and relationships in somewhat entertaining ways. This party had us line up, and the entertainment was that one of the group's members, who worked as a police psychic, was to come down the line of people, stand in front of each, and say something, then move to the next person. We were to remain standing in the line throughout that process. When the police psychic stood in front of me, he said several things including that I had an IQ of 165 - a bit higher than I had been tested long before although I had a severe case of the flu when taking the IQ test back in High School. He then moved on to the next person, and moved down the line; then he turned and left, going out the door that was visible from where we stood in the line. Suddenly out of that same door, a man emerged that I did not quite recognize, muscular and lean, with a look of almost ferocious determination on his face, and he was headed right toward me. Although it was odd, his focus seemed to be on the place I was standing but not on me there, very odd. He strode powerfully right at me and clearly would have knocked me down as if not seeing me there, so I stepped back out of the way, since he seemed to want to be where I had been, and I was a meek polite person. He then turned and stood in the line where I had been standing, as if me. Then a very attractive young woman came out of that door, scanned down the line as if counting people, then headed straight for where I had been standing, and she stopped in front of the guy who had taken my place, and introduced herself and soon they were chatting and the group broke up and she was going off with him. While I stood and watched in lonely amazement at it all.

Anybody know what was going on and how? Besides that the guy had ripped off a girlfriend that I so desperately needed, how did he do it? And why?

Other data is that I never was able to meet a woman to date at that singles group, and after several years I gave up and went to a different church which had a singles group. There I too was never able to meet a woman to date. Life was a terribly lonely thing for me all those years.

Diversity in energy sources is likely to confer resiliency

Just as biodiversity of life forms makes for more resilient biological systems, diversity in energy sources is also likely to confer resiliency to our way of life. And our civilization is dependent on abundant and immediately present energy to do the enormous work of our busy life which is quite impossible for our human muscles. As anyone intimately knows when he has had to push his two thousand pound car even a few feet, not to mention the tens of thousands more of those feet the car must move merely to commute to work that day. We are very dependent on enormous amounts of supplemental energy from external sources, in our daily life.

Electrical energy is often what is considered when we talk of "energy" in daily life, probably because it is so easily transported along wires from its generating source to the point of use, such as to a room's light fixture or a microwave oven cooking dinner at home. So diversity of energy supply seems particularly applicable to electrical energy. This applies most easily to electrical utilities; having some sources of wind power and solar electric power fed into grids mostly energized by coal fired plants and nuclear powerplants, might only provide ten percent of the overall energy from coal and nuclear, but when coal and nuclear quit, that ten percent from wind and solar could become very important to life. Hydroelectric electrical energy is also an important but relatively small contribution to the overall enormous electrical energy we consume each day.

Energy, of course, comes in many forms, some more applicable to specific uses than others. Hydrocarbon combustion is essential for making cement for concrete. Gasoline has been the energy source of convenience for cars for much of a century, because of its portability and usefulness in internal combustion engines. On site windmills were important for lifting water from wells out far from other energy sources, even before electrical or gasoline driven motors were available to lift the water for farm use.

The article "Preparing for climate change 'will boost economy" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12384389 points out that climate change (regardless of whether mankind's enormous CO2 input to the atmosphere is the primary cause of it, or merely is nature capriciously freaking out nowadays) will increasingly bring interruptions to energy supplies, and being ready to deal with that is prudent. Energy source diversity ought to be a factor in public electric utilities, instead of solely depending on whatever is the lowest cost, making it the only energy source.

It also seems prudent then to include local energy supplies at the user level, such as at each home. A rooftop solar panel that provides say 100 watts in daytime, along with electrical energy storage such as a battery, could provide lighting, computer use, a few minutes microwave cooking, and some small hand tool use during extended main power outages; rooftop water heating could similarly reduce routine energy consumption and provide hot water during outages of power mains. Given suitable places outdoors to use them, solar ovens can cook meals, bake cakes and heat coffee water, when there is no other power source other than a clear sky's sunshine in the daytime. If each home had these prepared, and occasionally in use just for practice and a bit of added energy efficiency, resiliency in basic lifestyle survival could be enhanced greatly.

Puzzle pieces

It is interesting how the complexities of events sometimes interconnect in small ways. For example, the recent fracas in Tucson where someone shot up a bunch of people, including a Congresswoman, with a Glock 9 mm pistol. Articles about it showed photos of that kind of pistol.

When I was a youth, fresh from reading of WWII scrapping and cowboy westerns, I had fantasies of becoming a gun collector, and read up on the old guns. That did not happen for me, and my knowledge of them about ended back half a century ago, maybe with Army ROTC in college adding a bit.

Anyway, that image of a Glock 9 mm caught my attention a bit; and now I remember what it is about. Back when I was working as an electronic technician, and very desperate for work in the late 1990's, work that was hard to find then especially for an older man like I already was, I ended up working at a job with one other person, who was the only one who knew the job, which involved test and repair of an infrared gas analyzer used for monitoring landfill (garbage dump) gasses. My companion technician was an unusual young man, descended of boxer genes, played rapper music loudly all the time, and liked to cut things with the crafts knives we were issued and would often snag the one off my workbench; he could throw it and stick it into things unerringly, and said he was going to do that to my back. He seemed to frequently provoke me as if trying to get my ire up, but am not easily provoked into physical action. He even told me that he was the one who was going to kill me. It was a difficult job in many ways, cooped up with that guy in an isolated building in a landfill area; but I did adapt, desperate for a paycheck; I even learned to appreciate the rapper music he constantly played loudly, seeing the state of life being proclaimed in it. He did have a system of ethics, however. And he had been working as a security man in the underground security labyrinth of a large amusement park, and still had his connections in the private security networks. There were multiple peculiarities involved; including that I was interviewed for the job by a guy high up in the ARCO skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles. And my coworker often used a computer terminal to communicate with other people but I was never invited to use the email or computer, and he hid the screen from my view.

Although tough he never seemed angry, just coolly aggressive, ever like a boxer in the ring. And I was totally dependent on learning from him how to do my job, other than my general knowledge of electronics and science that I already had; the job included use of potentially explosive methane gases used for calibration of the instruments, too. He was interested in my life, and I since was freshly suffering from having experienced a traumatic razzing about my KESTS to GEO concept shortly before I came to work there, and so I gave him a copy of my technical paper I had presented at Princeton to the Space Studies Institute - that was in May 1997 - only to get it refused for publication and be laughed away in the eventual proceedings. And my aging mother had loaned me the money to do the paper and make the long trip, showing she believed in me; and now I had let her down in my big best effort; it was a multiply hard time for me, and I had to have a paycheck and jobs were almost non-existent for me. Anyway, my coworker kept the copy of my technical paper for a few days, then threw it on the floor and proclaimed I was a destroyer of his world like Einstein was (he thought Einstein invented the atomic bomb.)

The company was bought in a couple of months and moved to a different location which had lot of other people in the same building, and one day, the other tech was given the notice he was being laid off. This surprised me greatly, that there would be a layoff, and he would go. Just about everybody was afraid of him, and to make that step was risky. I watched as he emptied out his drawer in his workbench, and the last thing he removed was a boxy kind of large pistol that somewhat resembled the old Colt .45 automatic pistol which I remembered from my youth interests. I thought it must not be a real pistol, as it had a boxy upper area, unlike the familiar curved areas of the .45.

But now the association is made: it was a Glock 9mm pistol he had in there. Same upper boxy shape. Like was used in the Tucson fracas. I learned something.

So still the pieces to the puzzle come in. What it all points to is still out of my conscious view, however. It is not an interesting puzzle to me; seems an uglier side of humanity; but in the interests of survival some part of me does pay a little attention at times, like now. I don't think he is an immediate danger to me anymore - probably - but somebody is, I sense.

Why can't people stick to constructive things, I wonder, The world has huge amounts of constructive things desperately needing doing. Well, perhaps my coworker back then shows a reason - the young women there at the new job location all wanted to be on his good side ... his very good side.

CO2 increase and emotional state brain function

I wonder if there has been recent research into the effects of small increases in carbon dioxide in the air we breathe, regarding the present-day average emotional state of people?

An online search shows that the air outside has risen from 288 ppmv in 1850 to 369.5 ppmv in 2000 ( http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html ) and that in Biosphere II it rose to about 3400 ppm ( http://www.biospherics.org/experimentchrono1.html ) about ten times as much. Although the ecosystem was quite strange in that semi-closed ecosystem with all that CO2, such as Morning Glory plants running rampant, the effects of increased CO2 being breathed by the crew of Biosphere II is a bit hard to find right now.

I recall reading, at the time the first crew exited from Biosphere II, that the crew was getting into hot arguments at the mealtimes, such as claiming someone else got more food than they did, and this was a big deal to them worthy of severe anger; it was said that the increased CO2 they had long term breathed had severely affected their mental state.

Our bodies and minds are keenly adapted to the high energy system utilizing the oxygen in the air, and exhaling the CO2 we produce inside that is of greater concentration than in the air outside our lungs. That adaption was to a CO2 level of less than 288 ppmv in 1850. Now it is 370 ppmv, about 27% higher concentration of CO2 and going up rapidly.

Could it be, I wonder, if that CO2 in our blood that has to diffuse out into lung air that already has 27% higher CO2 concentration in it, is having a noticeable effect on us. Particularly, in what seems to be a generally more irascible interaction style, both locally observed, and per news online. Our brains need lots of energy, more than our muscles; so our brains might start having subtle responses to extra CO2 even before we show fatigue in exercise due to excess CO2 in the air we breathe.

And indoor air, especially in semi-sealed up wintertime rooms, probably has significantly more CO2 in it from our accumulated exhalations, that might add to the effect.

This question is in the quest for understanding of why people choose to do what they do.

Yet of course also the Biosphere II experiment in Arizona comes to mind regarding my extension of teh KESTS to GEO concept to utilizing the highly efficient continuous transportation system to build and poplate a coupel of 10,000-person rotating cities in GEO, expected to be closely balanced ecosystems. Of course, the environment in Arizona does not have the much higher solar influx on one side and the deep cold of space on the shadow side, existing in GEO; yet, they are both semi-closed eoosystems, a bit like my aquariums at home as a youth. Carbon dioxide in the habitats in GEO would just be one of a huge number of living parameters that would need balancing by the myriad interacting living and electromechanical systems there.

But if we as a world of people are actually starting to react toward excess CO2 in our breathing air, so much that we cannot get together and fix the problem but instead just get group-angry and consider fighting is the answer, we are probably done for.

When I was very young, I sometimes got severe asthma, which no doubt exposed me to higher concentrations of CO2 than most people experience. What I remember mostly was that it totally got my attention, trying to squeeze a bit of air in and then back out again. Maybe that is why it is a higher valence item for me than it is to the general public. Nonetheless, the subject might be worthy of some focused research in the near future. Some parts of the brain might alter function faster than other parts, too, as the CO2 content in the blood rises.

Speech, blogging, energy, employment

I have been fantasizing about how to provide jobs for all those 15 million Americans that are underemployed. My previous post "Some ways to expand the nation's skill set and knowledge base" http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2011/02/some-ways-to-expand-nations-skill-set.html seemed to strongly approach that potential, enabling all folks with home internet access to participate in a nationwide manufacturing system; but there would still be lots of folks left out. Even the homeless folks seeking some kind of work need to be included in the "everybody gets a job" idea. My fantasizing today came up with making a declaration that all under-employed people are automatically volunteers for increasing American productivity; but, the recent health insurance thing has pointed out that it may not be wise to set a precedent for saying all people are any particular thing, since some future tyrant political party might misuse such a principle. So I tempered it with the hypothesis that America could offer every American, every person in America, continuous opportunity to register as a member of a "everybody gets a job" system. I'd think that everybody could have a job found for them that they could do, no matter how handicapped the person is. 90 years old, wheelchair bound, severely autistic, paraplegic, whoever, ought to be able to do something productive and interesting to them, however tiny a task.

A thought now is that the conventional business system might take offense at such a thing, believing that a vast pool of desperate people seeking work, is needed to provide them cheap workers for their businesses, so as to maximize their business profit. But all they would have to do is offer the person a better job with adequate pay and benefits, to get the worker, I would think; thus make a little less profit but provide the worker with a better life as a result. Maybe this violates some principle of doing business (I recall the Ferengi's book of business principles in a Star Trek series; as well as the old saying "never give a sucker an even break") but I think as a whole Americans are better than that.

Anyway, this post is to celebrate President Obama's recent address http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/05/weekly-address-winning-future-through-american-innovation which covers a huge number of the things I have urged for decades, although offers different solutions in most cases. America needs to wean herself of most of foreign oil that saps tens of billions of dollars out of our economy every year so as to push our cars and trucks around and run the lights; so we need to diversify our energy sources to provide resiliency in our economy, since we are quite dependent on "energy" to do the muscle work that runs our civilization, no longer dependent on human and animal muscles to do stuff.

Putting people and innovators to the task of providing energy to America, is surely a useful way to put people to work. Some people say that America ought to do without those energy options unless they are done by private industry - but private industry has not been doing the job, no doubt due to the mandate to make the most profit right away, and much of that involves spending it on petrochemical energy sources, both here and offshore, business as usual stuff, nevermind the big picture effects on America and her people. Thus it won't get done, unless a bigger entity teams us all up to get it done, and that is commonly known as 'government". We all pool a part of our income to finance our greater causes, both long and short term; this is called "taxes."

China has outstripped America in the solar power field; no doubt China is as keenly in need of multiple and abundant energy sources as we are, but our local companies are not producing solar power panels, because China is eager to do it, and is supported by government financing so as to keep the price down, defeating the productivity in countries with no government support of the industry. Rooftop solar panels are probably not the major answer for our energy needs, but they can provide some of it while also offering a bit of energy in emergencies when the primary power systems fail for awhile. Wind turbines have the potential to put energy into a pool of primary power systems, as well as wave and tidal energy systems, geothermals too. Nuclear fission power stations have long been touted as if the only needed source of electrical energy; coal fired power generating plants continue to provide most of our energy here in America.

I won't dwell much again here on my own concept for an energy-supported centrifugal transportation structure system for building and maintaining abundant Solar Power Stations in geostationary earth orbit in this blog post, but that potential for the near or further future ought to be enough to ensure the continued exercise of space technologies. Those solar power satellites could obsolete even the nuclear power stations along with coal burning plants, but right now, business profits are rolling in for businesses by keeping things like they are. I also won't harp on the vision tha nature sequestered the carbon long ago in the form of coal and gas and frozen methane deep under the surface of the earth so that life could have an abundant oxygen atmosphere for high energy life to exist; that is getting lots of attention now, finally. It is important to keep life fairly stable for everybody, as we can cope with only so much in our daily lives, avoiding rocking the boat; but longer term survival requires a bit more vision and guidance for the American people, even for the world, than has been commonly practiced.

I think that the above-mentioned Obama speech addresses a lot of these issues in constructive ways, and I really appreciate that.

Some ways to expand the nation's skill set and knowledge base

This is to explore some ways to expand the nation's skill set and knowledge base while also enabling the manufacture of some products at prices competitive with similar products made offshore, and particularly brings the man millions of under-employed Americans back into the overall productivity of the nation.

Background:

Fifteen million Americans currently unemployed - and lots more probably under-employed - represents an enormous human potential for productivity. Surely there are ways to utilize this productivity potential as a group while waiting for an adequate job to "happen" for us individually. We probably don't have to be merely existing at the mercy of businesses who are looking for employees to do the work. We can be putting more attention into our independent health, maintaining and expanding our skill sets and knowledge base. And more than that, we can explore being productive as volunteer workers and even creating jobs themselves.

Looking at how this would fit into the larger picture, President Obama has focused on boosting America's productivity, focusing on "to build stuff and invent stuff" more than is already happing, so as to both provide products that we and the world need, but also to provide jobs for people so as to provide them income while adding to the nation's productivity.

Expecting the free enterprise system to automatically create the businesses that efficiently employ those 15 million unemployed people clearly has not worked. Part of it is that a business that is solely focused in providing the most profit for the investors, it has been far more economical to have work done offshore than to utilize our own people to do the jobs. The cost of living, particularly housing, in America is far higher than it is in the developing countries, and thus our wages have to be comparably higher.

To fit into this picture, this means that our individual work has to far out-produce that of the typical offshore employee's work, so that our pay is high enough to cover our much higher living expenses. Can we do this? After all, it has always been up to the employer, the business people, to provide us the jobs that pay us enough to enable our living nicely.

As a worker we usually desire to have a nicely adequate income while doing work that is a fairly good fit for our native aptitudes and learned skill sets and learned knowledge base, and provides a feeling of doing something innately worthwhile, too, insofar as possible. What can we do to enhance the return to this way of life, while no one is paying us to do work for them?

Business can be a power game with multiple parameters. One's life as an employee instead of a business owner can still see some of that happening. The bigger picture is that the nation as a whole needs to produce enough to fill the internal needs as well as provide a balance of trade with other nations; but the free enterprise business owner - business person tends to only look at how to make the most profit off of some business territory formed of physical and intellectual property being utilized by workers employed by the business.

The business person is also aware of being part of a bigger picture, but is more likely to be focused on membership obligations of being part of business organizations and political activism. Currently it seems that the GOP may be tying up jobs favoring those who vote for them, may be part of the current job picture; that is a powerful incentive to vote their way so as to keep a good job; all a somewhat covert phenomenon. There are relatively few business owners as compared to workers, and so they need to influence the votes of workers. Gathering all such parameters telling it like it is, is necessary so as to be able to define the problem correctly so as to come up with effective solutions.

A highly useful parameter is that of the individual's Temperament or Jungian-Psyche-type; this defines how the individual can best function in the larger picture including interacting with others of both similar and different types. This author did not discover what his Temperament - type - is, until having had a 44-year employment in jobs that were the opposite to what comes natural to his type. This shows the flexibility we have, the diversity of our individual potentials, but it also shows how ignorance of our type - and lack of awareness of the other types of people with which we interact - can make life unnecessarily hard and be less than optimally productive. A system of typing that seems to nicely describe the types, can be found online at "16types.com" and basically points out that there are four types of people - which could be called catalyst, theorist, stabilizer, and improvisor, per their earlier naming system - and each of those has for possible styles of interaction. Learning this information about oneself and significant others in the job scene can eliminate lots of blind spots in what we do.

Each of is is able to function in all the four types and interaction styles, but it is a whole lot easier to primarily utilize our innate way, which seems to be something we are born with. Having a job that utilizes these innate strengths is as important as well utilizing our education and job skill sets.

The 15 million unemployed are hurting because of lack of income being provided by their life efforts. Unemployment compensation is far less than regular pay, but expenses are less too, such as the cost of commute to work is not there.

But we unemployed and under-employed - and I include many of so-called "retired" folks like myself who would rather be doing some useful work at least part of the time - still have major human resource potential that does not need to go to waste while begging for some business to offer us a job. It would be wise to utilize this human resource potential to the fullest under the circumstances. We have time and home facilities available are resources, and the internet connection to our home computers brings us into useful contact even without an expensive commute to some job somewhere.

Some suggested solutions:

Conceivably we can create a job system ourselves, primarily to fill in between "real" jobs, yet conceivably sometimes we could create "real" productive jobs which would be seen as competition by existing businesses. Yet ours is a free enterprise system that ought to work both ways.

An "unemployed" or "under-employed" person can do such things as taking care of their health at home, saving some on medical expenses. We can seek, find, and do volunteer work that practices our employable skill sets or extends into new fields of endeavor - the author currently does volunteer work in data processing for a natural history museum, and does audio book recording, for example, all done from home using his own computer and linked via the internet to the organizations utilizing that volunteer work's product. Doing volunteer work provides expansion of one's skill set, practice of skills to stay in shape, learn new things, do something that feels worthwhile, and is interesting to do to some extent, cheering life up a bit. Especially for people who are "workaholics" who define their life in terms of their job work to a significant extent.

So while waiting for a "real" job, perhaps some of us can create a volunteer job system, one that could easily turn into a money-making thing from which at least part-time pay is eventually received.

The author has looked into the "work at home" ads in email and considers them most likely mere scams, not worthy of attention. Yet the potential for "working at home" seems very real, if not being plied by tricksters.

The job party seems a way that we under-employed can do something about the lack of meaningful work, resolving the problems. The internet connectivity amongst us ought to enable utilization of our skills, knowledge and interests while we are under-employed by conventional job providers, businesses looking for workers.

America was made great by our productivity, such as in agriculture and manufacturing. Agriculture remains as before, but manufacturing has largely gone offshore in the business search for lower cost workers and facilities to get manufacturing done. How can we utilize our existing resources to provide manufacturing at home instead of solely offshore?

Well, we can literally do manufacturing at home, literally at our homes, thus saving the cost of industrial buildings and expense of long commutes that consume time and fuel energy, and wear our vehicles out. Exploring learning how to do this seems a worthy effort for lots of us who are into manufacturing's various aspects.

Some of us were manufacturing supervisors, who could find ways to supervise various home manufacturing activities, linked via the internet. The free Skype video-chat system can even provide almost face to face conversation between such supervisors and those at home who are more focused on doing the physical parts of manufacturing. Skye type interaction also can include sending text between each which can be kept as records for reference after the video conversations are long past.

Our home computers represent a potential for being interfaces between a wide variety of manufacturing equipment that can occupy a desk or workshop area in a home. Conventional hobbyist and home craftsman tools would be starters, but design of specialized sub-assembly manufacture that plugs into one's home computer such as through a USB port, would provide telemetry of how the manufacturing equipment is being used, such as the depth of drilling done by a drill press on the bench, and the temperature of the soldering iron used for hand assembly of printed circuit board assemblies, or the chemical bath composition in making the circuit boards themselves, for example. A home could have several such plug-in subassembly manufacturing setups, available to take on quite different job types, simply by switching between the manufacturing equipment sets. the computer can function as a data collector of what is done at the manufacturing workstation, and it can also supply detailed instructions=s for utilizing the manufacturing equipment. As such, the computer provides a path for home education, expanding the user's knowledge base, and guiding experience that expands the physical skill sets.

One of the first kinds of products of home manufacturing workstations needs to be the workstations themselves, which would be a bootstrap process where ever more complex work-educations plug-in work modules are designed, prototyped, debugged and manufactured at the homes and distributed

The system depends heavily on the delivery system, including UPS, FedEx and other carriers, yet also within a local community could utilize teenagers driving to deliver materials and subassemblies among homes within a relatively local area, thus giving the teenagers - and even retirees - something useful to do in the system.

The system design and engineering of the home manufacturing-education workstations is also amenable to unemployed people at home who have those abilities.

Focus would be on can-do more than on degrees or former employment jobs done. As such there needs to be evaluation constantly going on, both by the home worker and all those involved with what he/she does in relation to the larger system.

Safety would also be needed monitoring such as use of sharp tools and materials that need special handling such as aluminum powder produced in working of aluminum parts, and of volatiles produced by adhesives. Many of these things already are familiar to the "Do It Yourselfers" home hobbyist and crafts people, and this needs to be consciously guided via the internet by safety supervisory volunteer staff. , just like those supervising the details of each manufacturing step done by the workers at their home workstations.Unemployed educators, teachers, and those with basic aptitudes for that kind of thing, could assist in the teaching via the home computer link through the internet, to provide easy instructions for using the equipment to manufacture the subassemblies, and in other places assemble the subassemblies into whole products, and test their quality and functionality; others would provide the packaging manufacture, yet others provide the actual placing in the packaging as a finished product. All these functions could be done at home, the in=-between stages being transported by the commercial carriers and by local volunteer delivery folks.

The initial setup of a home manufacturing-education workstation system needs to be done with existing items, with which then more specialized equipment and systems are developed and built. For example, the cameras on the common iTouch and iPhone can be used to show teachers or supervisors what is being physically done; the close up capability of those cameras is impressive, and if placed against an eye loupe or a microscope, can provide manufacturing feedback to others in great visual detail, such as the inspection of soldering on an printed circuit board assembly, and eventually surface mount assembly and associated jigs for semi-automatic assembly.Drilling, bending, sawing mechanical operations can be watched via such small low cost and widely available devices like the iPhone. An ad just appeared today for software to enable one to make applications for the iPhone/iTouch which might also be useful for adapting these hand held or mountable communication deices for specialized uses in home manufacturing-education workstations.

Developing transducers for measuring dimensions and pressures involved at the home workstation need also be done, for direct telemetry of the ongoing manufacturing 's details, which would be sent over the internet to be evaluated via supervisory computers and volunteer staff.

Most likely, everybody involved in the home education-manufacturing workstation system needs to be frequently provides information as to how it is all progressing in functionality and productivity, as well as how it fits into the large picture of the nation's productivity both potential and actualized. And everybody in the system needs to have the opportunity to provide feedback as to their experiences and ideas for expansion and improvement, to add to the pool of ideas and information to make the system ever better.

Potential problems:

The home manufacturing-education workstation system most likely would eventually be seen as unfavorable rivalry to some conventional businesses, that might attempt to stop it, such as by buying it up and dismantling it, or by interfering with it such as by patenting parts of the system and refusing to let anybody make the pieces that were patented, so as to make it hard to have the system function efficiently; such deli=berate interference is considered good business practice, by some companies, unfortunately. And like little kids, some companies really believe they own exclusive rights to everything. Such business people lack the bigger picture of the nation's needs for optimum productivity using out human resources especially.

Another form of this could be from often-illegal but still practiced misuse of the "employment agreement" often required for employment in a high tech industry, which ostensibly is to prevent an employee from stealing a company-created idea or process and going off and starting their own business using it for free. But in reality the wording on such agreements implies the employer automatically freely owns all ideas the employee has or will get during the period of employment, irregardless of the ideas applicability to the job duty performance or even of the fields of interest of the employer, which are usually quite limited. In practice, this has blocked motivation for employes who are inclined to high tech interests and thus are likely to get ideas which are not part of the job performance. In creating the hypothetical home manufacturing-education workstations, if it is getting to look successful, some former employers might try to claim that it violated the terms of the signed "employment agreement" of a former job, just to block progress. But except in a few states, such claims for the ideas spontaneously by employees that are not part of doing their paid-for job, are righteously considered invalid; and the employer can no longer threaten to fire the employee for exploring a non-job-related idea on his/her own time, since the person is no longer working for them, of course. Although there could be the threat to blacklist the employee when references are required from one's resume looking for formal work, which could be a problem.

Nonetheless, in general, business people are more honest and responsible than that, and hopefully regular business corporations will approve of the skill-enhancing function of the home manufacturing-education workstation project, if it comes into reality.

References:

Reviving America by a combined co-located industry with higher education concept http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2009/08/co-located-industry-education-sites-to.html
Home internet-linked manufacturing workstations http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2009/01/home-internet-linked-manufacturing.html
A rant re jobs, corporations and the economic situation: http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2010/02/rant-re-jobs-corporations-and-economic.html
See also my article on scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/14139124/Home-Internetlinked-Manufacturing-Workstations

A youth pondering what is economics

Long ago when I was a youth - and I was an unusually smart youth then, before getting knocked in the head - I pondered economics. How does it work. Say, a town has a farmer who raises potatoes and another who raises chickens, and they sell to the grocer. The grocer sells the food to the shoemaker who pays for the food by selling shoes to someone else. Each person has to provide enough value added from his/her specialty so as to pay for what is needed to be received from the other townspeople.

There is some barter product swapping, but mostly all exchanges go for a liquidated value as a price in cash. Each person has to use their skills and physical resources to add to the value to ask a higher price for the resulting product and thus become earnings, which are then used to buy things needed that they themselves cannot produce.

The town as a whole provides most of what they all need, but sometimes the town does not produce a product or service that is needed, and has to buy from some other town; and similarly the town as a whole has to produce items of equal value to the other town as a swap, probably again using money as an in-between quantity of value.

Another part of the picture is that sometimes somebody collects more money than spends on what is needed, and either directly loans out that money to someone else or assigns it to a bank who lends it out, all for an expected profit from the value-added by the user of the temporary money supply, called "interest," some of which is profit by the bank and some of it is shared with the person who provided the excess money in the first place.

Those are value-added monetary equivalents of increase in value of resources modified by the value-adding person's skill application effort.

However, there are the basic resources not of the human resources type, such as land territory with its specific reception of solar energy and precipitation, and also mineral resources that can be extracted thus adding value to it and then being sold to someone, thus receiving money in exchange for parts of that resource territory, such as iron ore mined or oil pumped out, all given over permanently to someone else for money.

A portion of land area can be divided into portions, and housing structures be built on some of those portions, and the whole sub-section of land with its value-added house upon it, for money.

The construction of transportation paths between the homes and farms and towns is started as a business, but when it expands to encompass a huge number of homes and towns and businesses, the paying of a fee for right to pass between each place, paid to the various road owners, can bog the system down, so an over-arching business is formed that can negotiate between the various towns and states, and instead of having the infrastructure to collect a fee at every little bit of road paid in return for right to use the bit of road each trip, all the people pay into a common fund that covers the cost of building and maintaining the whole road system.

Education of the children also starts with local schoolhouses and paid for the townspeople with children, but people move from town to town and standardization of what is taught so the graduates will have a variety of useful skills, also becomes an over arching activity like the road system, and given enough of those common needs, they eventually avoid becoming all bogged down with all the collectors of expenses of each little routine service done, that an entity is formed called "government" that figures out what it all costs to do it efficiently, and assigns a payment for getting the roads, education, etc done equitably and efficiently for all to use, and assigns that as a specific tax to the users of the system, as averaged over a lifetime.

Some people are able to save money either under the mattress or in a bank, so that when they grow too old to work easily enough to earn a living, they have that stashed money to pay their living expenses for awhile; but large numbers of people are just employees of businesses, so part of their pay is automatically saved out and sent to the government to be the saver of the money, and when the workers retire, the government pays enough for survival level money for those retired folks to live.

People sometimes get sick or injured, and others apply their skill set to help those people get well; this too is at first an individual thing but sharing of skill knowledge among medical practitioners is most efficiently handled by the government too, paid for by the simple one-quantity per year tax system. Adjacent territories are set up by other governments, and sometimes the excess specialized produce of one government is sold to another government, in exchange much as originally between the farmer and the shoemaker.

But occasionally some of the folks in some government decide that it is more efficient to go raid their neighbor's fields, than to buy what is needed. So each government needs to hire professional raiders and defenders, to provide that function for the whole governed territory, so that any small part of the governed territory immediately has that hired group of raider-defenders go assault the invaders, thus the local invaded people do not have to do that themselves, and would surely lose against the larger assaulting force; but when backed up by the larger group of defenders, they can fend off the invasion. The cost of supporting this force of invaders-defender professionals is also paid for as part of the taxes collected by the government.

This whole system is like some complex clock that when wound up, busily ticks away and things move here and there like the clock's hands, things proceed as a complex process.

But there is another phenomenon observed in such larger system functioning, in that some people provide their value-adding function by hoarding and reselling at a higher price without adding value to the hoarded items. This way they can acquire huge sums of money with little expense or effort, other than to do the information gathering and having the buying and selling processes done that provide the squeeze on those who need the resources.

Sometimes following a principle of charging what the market will bear, besides hoarding, some items acquire a value by being one of a kind, such as works of art by a deceased artist, and trading these items back and forth, each time increasing the price per what the market will bear, usually only a game among those who had gotten wealthy by similar means and hoarding and reselling at what the squeezed market would bear.

Sometimes a wealthy person will have a business using the skills of some people who set up a business territory, protected by the government, and sell the product at a price that the market will bear, but which costs the owner of the company very little as compared to what the owner pays the helpers for their work; the users could have been charged a much lower price and all would have been paid equitably, but the business owner elects to charge what the market will bear, with its government-protected business territory, thus becoming wealthy vastly beyond what they can possibly use to live on. This money came out of the resources of all the users of that product, so they as a group become poorer and the rich become richer, there being a constant amount of money in the system.

There becomes a living wage gradient among the working class, and some people fall clear off the scale and become unemployed, no work is offered them that they can do, while their needed livelihood income is stashed by the ultra-wealthy few folks.

Each of the interlocking systems from road building to price fixing eventually gets given over to the government as the only unbiased participant in it all. But maintaining an unbiased state of government is difficult, as the establishers of the rules by which government is done, can get changed by those responsible for maintaining the government; elections pick who does that governing function, but then special interests ply those elected ones for special favors; if it gets too unbalanced, different people get elected, in hopes that overall the system will become on average equitable.

No means for creating an equitably unbiased government have yet been devised, given that the system's needs are ever changing, as the system needs to respond to the ever changing world of physical resources and human skill resources.

So that seemed to be the basic idea of what economics was about. When taking a course in economics in college, it seemed to only focus on a few of those aspects, not the whole interlocking system.

Now, no longer the youth, and in fact on the other end of a lifespan, in which I live below the poverty level in retirement, glad for the government's retirement money so as to pay the bills, clearly I did not know how to interact adequately with that economic system. I had thought that I would do the grunt work for employers to pay for basic expenses in life while in my non-working hours I created some innovative concept to solve a major problem the world clearly seemed to be headed for, but found that getting paid for that key I eventually created, is not part of how the system of economics works. Someone else will hoard that knowledge and then when I am gone will demand a huge sum for it, and then it will go into part of the game of the wealthy, trading back and forth for every higher prices, none of it going to the original creator of the item, such as is done for other kinds of works of creative art.

Even as a senior I still ponder things, and at this time it may seem that life is not always fair; but in the long run, lifetime after lifetime, the pendulum of karma will swing. In some other lifetime I will reap the reward for creating the keys to help civilization. But in this lifetime, I must be reaping the reward for being a too shrewd ruthless businessman in a previous lifetime. Somehow, all this keeps mankind interested in busying at the drama of it all.