David Brin

This isn't a story about all capitalism. It's a cautionary tale, a story of what happens when capital is not responsive to local conditions and social factors. This is why the concept of Triple Bottom Line accounting was created http://www.economist.com/node/14301663 . However, power in late American capitalism still stems from short-term decisions in finance, ignoring the issues of natural finite resources, ably conceptualised by the Rocky Mountain Institute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Capitalism:_Creating_the_Next_Industrial_Revolution .

I also recommend the writings of American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen from 100 years ago on how it is remote capital that increases the likelihood of businesses to have terribly deleterious effects on the physical, biological and social environment.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/438
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorstein_Veblen

Change happens, and often it brings benefits: but unless we are mindful, as say Elon Musk attempts to be, in our desires to improve the world with our technolgies, then dystopias will follow.

I can also recommend the various works of David Brin on the near to medium future, whose mind is quite as sharp as Musk's and other meta-systemic thinkers we know and appreciate. http://www.davidbrin.com/

> repurpose rockets in their whole

Reminds me of a short sci-fi story:

> The engines are part of the orbiter, so they can be brought home and reused. The solid boosters drop off minutes after liftoff and are recovered for refurbishment. Even the unmanned heavy-lift cargo launchers use the same basic system. But until our group came along, the huge external tanks were simply dumped, after fueling the shuttle to almost orbital velocity.

> [...] The main purpose of the design is simply to keep the tanks from falling. The two massive ends of the Farm act like a dipole in the gradient of the Earth's gravitational field, so each deck winds up orbiting edge-forward, like a flat plate skimming. This reduces the drag caused by the upper fringes of the atmosphere, extending our orbital lifetime.

https://www.davidbrin.com/tankfarm.htm

i was trying to remember Brin's politics & still dont have a good feel, but i quite enjoyed the review: https://www.davidbrin.com/politics.html

this article is a great takedown of John C Wright's post. and bless his soul- i loved the Golden Oecumeme trilogy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Oecumene) so much when i read it, but yeah, John not only holds/held some dark scary views, he went so far as to create a good antithesis of hiw we might think. i wasnt aware Brin or others were replying but i was following John's blog. itcs awesome that we have such a great, enjoyable, still necessary rebuttal to an idea that's still scarily about. i do wonder what else might be added, ehat else we might say, but this is an awesome deacde old link to share, thanks.

> North vs South, Red State vs Blue State, liberal vs conservative, religious vs secular. Whatever you want to call it, Americans - it seems - are separating themselves into two (or more) distinct and ideologically opposed groups. This is nothing new, of course, but what IS new (at least in my memory) is that there are fewer and fewer opportunities for common discourse.

It's... honestly not as new as you think. Not even the lack of common ground bit.

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2014/09/phases-of-american-civil-war.html

Creating common ground is the actual job of politicians. They're just bad at it. (Which isn't that surprising, given the sheer scope of the task and that a good number of them don't appear to realize it.)

I think it erodes it very much. And while "by their actions a lot of modern-day CEOs and politicians could be described as incompetent and/or at least malicious if not outright evil", I also learned that a lot of times, it's the media that give this perception by misrepresenting their actions/motivations to people.

And as for institutions, it's fun to laugh at them while living in a world almost fully conditioned on the ongoing competence of those institutions.

Writer David Brin talks a lot about this in his article, "Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled With Idiots", which I'll strongly recommend here.

http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/idiotplot.html

A great 2006 essay on the other side of this coin is "Why Johnny Can't Code" by David Brin [1]. From the lead paragraph: "BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming."

The author ended up buying a used Commodore 64 for his son.

He touched this topic again in his blog in 2011 [2] (scroll to "encouraging kids to program"; he also participates in the comment section).

I personally think single board computers seem to keep tinkering and line coding alive.

1: https://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/

2: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/06/milestones-leading-up-to-good.html