[...] contrary to the myth that the original colonial invaders of the Americas found only small wandering bands of Neolithic hunter-gatherers and mysteriously collapsed empires, the Western Hemisphere was densely populated. An estimated 100 million people lived in the Americas at the time of the European invasion, existing in a range of sophisticated and highly developed societies.

Scientists after Newton were qualitatively more able than before, etc. My slogan for this is “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points”.

[...] One of our many problems with thinking is “cognitive load”: the number of things we can pay attention to at once. The cliche is 7±2, but for many things it is even less. We make progress by making those few things be more powerful.

This is one of the reasons mathematicians like compact notation. The downside is the extra layers of abstraction and new cryptic things to learn---this is the practice part of violin playing---but once you can do this, what you can think about at once has been vastly magnified.

The story behind Lisp is fun (you can read John McCarthy’s account in the first History of Programming Languages). One of the motivations was that he wanted something like “Mathematical Physics” — he called it a “Mathematical Theory of Computation”. Another was that he needed a very general kind of language to make a user interface AI — called “The Advice Taker” — that he had thought up in the late 50s.

He could program — most programs were then in machine code, Fortran existed, and there was a language that had linked lists.

John made something that could do what any programming language could do (relatively easy), but did it in such a way so that it could express the essence of what it was about (this was the math part or the meta part or the modern Maxwell’s Equations part, however you might like to think of it). He partly did this — he says — to show that this way to do things was “neater than a Turing Machine”.

Alienation from our own labor is not only or even primarily a psychological condition, but a feature integral to capitalist social relations, one that profoundly damages us. The repetitive, often pointless monotony of most work, the jobs in which people spend a large part of their waking hours, “is a [...] stifling of one’s urge to self-fulfillment in the most important segment of one’s life, the spending of vital energies at tasks one would never dream of freely choosing.”

As soon as you monetize something in nature, nature always loses.

Our genus (Homo) had many branches, including us (Homo sapiens) and a number of species now extinct, such as Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo floresiensis, and the latest member, Homo naledi, whose remains were found in a cave in South Africa in 2013 and first described in 2015.

Capitalism: A system that does not meet the basic needs of the mass of humanity, a system that continues to harm so many people, a system in which countries use force to promote their perceived geopolitical and economic interests, unable to stop itself from destroying the biosphere it depends on, is a system that desperately needs to be superseded by a different system: one that has completely different goals, logic, and ways of operating, a society based on substantive human equality and that regenerates and then maintains a healthy ecosystem.

Capitalists cannot take into account the consequences of their actions (the “externalities”) in their pursuit of profits. As long as there is no interference with the accumulation of capital, emitted pollutants (and how they behave according to scientific laws) are viewed by capital as irrelevant to the operation of companies. Actually, they are not considered at all unless strong government regulations exist and are enforced.

The quintessentially human-created environment of the city, with acres of asphalt, canyons of steel, brick, and concrete, thousands of car engines, the screaming sirens and honking horns, and millions of humans, is also natural, constructed by a natural species. Cities are also places where wildlife exists, and are ecosystems in their own right.

In Moscow, there is a population of feral dogs who know how to use the subway.

It is that exploited, alienated and relatively powerless period, the working day, which reduces ... people to settle for commodity satisfaction in their “free time.” The bargain [...] extends its influence throughout all levels and institutions, marking out the shape of the “consumer society.” It is this society which threatens the environment with its unlimited appetite—unlimited precisely because its objects are so unsatisfying.

Gender violence is more of a threat to women’s health than the sum of all traffic accidents and malaria.

If we humans are a part of nature, then to even talk of a “pristine” environment at all is misrepresentative and ideological.

By making individual persons the solution to waste, we become the very thing capitalists want: consumers. Conscious and concerned or otherwise, it doesn’t matter. Efforts to change consumption habits instead of production will not solve the problem. As Samantha McBride writes: What we have for producers is freedom: freedom to be green or semi-green or not green, freedom to do what is in their best interests, without strife or inconvenience. What we have for citizens are (1) a definition of their scope of political action as not just personal behavior, but the purchase transaction, and (2) an utter lack of knowledge needed to reenter the realm of the political and advocate for regulatory change.112 Stressing individual responsibility of ordinary people leads us to ignore the waste associated with production. It also ignores the waste associated with consumption by the very wealthy, the military-industrial complex, the vast incarceration system, and the advertising industry. It leads us to disregard that companies will always be striving to sell more products year after year.

Let us not [...] flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first [...]. At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

The range of choices available to buyers is determined not by what is environmentally friendly, but by what can be sold profitably. As a result, we get micro-choices such as Ford vs Hyundai—but not real choices such as automobiles vs reliable and affordable public transit.

Nature is a hard word to define. Originating in Latin as natura, meaning “birth,” today people give the word a wide variety of meanings. Colloquially, it’s used as a blanket term applied to everything that isn’t human or constructed by humans. In everyday speech, people refer to animals as if humans were in an altogether different category (aside from species), instead of being fellow animals. [...] Nature in Western societies is commonly viewed as a place that we travel to visit rather than inhabit on a daily basis.

Neoliberalism has achieved an incredible stranglehold on our thinking in recent decades. Even people who genuinely care about the environment have started to believe that market-based solutions like pollution offsets and carbon trading offer a better solution than government regulation and enforcement.

Heede’s research shows that nearly two-thirds of anthropogenic carbon emissions originated in just 90 companies and government-run industries. Among them, the top eight companies—ranked according to annual and cumulative emissions—account for 20 percent of world carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement production since the Industrial Revolution. So why not just stop these companies from operating and promote the building of a clean energy system? There is no evidence that governments will discipline giant corporations and shift the global economy away from fossil fuels. To do so would require drastic downsizing or liquidation of many of the largest corporations on the planet. It would leave Wall Street in tatters. It would also require a huge investment to build a replacement consisting of renewable energy infrastructure. While costs for solar (PV) and wind energy installations have dropped drastically, and in some cases are cost competitive with new fossil fuel installations, it is wishful thinking of the most utopian kind to expect that capitalists and governments will allow public financing for an effort to replace existing electric power facilities. It is only when the elite feel a direct and immediate threat to their system of capital accumulation, such as a major war or civil insurrection, that they are willing to commit the vast amount of financial resources necessary and agree to have production directed by government.

In our society, however, recycling serves an important ideological function by convincing people that they’re doing something positive for the environment while obscuring the question of why so many products are purposely designed for single use or ready disposal. This perspective puts the responsibility of waste on the individual, not on the company or the system as a whole.

Relying on unpaid work done primarily by women instead of provided by social programs, means lower taxes on the wealthy and more profits for capitalists.

Advanced neurological and genetic research ... has shown that animals like chimpanzees, orcas and elephants possess self-awareness, self-determination and a sense of both the past and future. They have their own distinct languages, complex social interactions and tool use. They grieve and empathize and pass knowledge from one generation to the next. The very same attributes, in other words, that we once believed distinguished us from other animals.

The source of our alienation is the lack of control in the workplace, and the unequal opportunities it affords for financial well-being as well as quality of life. Consumerism is a form of emotional compensation we use in a futile attempt to overcome alienation. Recognizing this can help us begin to constructively deal with our alienation.

In a study across sixty-three countries, researchers estimated that approximately 20 percent of suicides were the result of unemployment.

Inherent in the blame-the-victim ideology is the myth of equal opportunity for everyone. If you work hard enough and make the right choices, you will succeed. But a child conceived and born into poverty, with its associated stresses and limitations, does not have the same opportunities as a child born into wealth. The continuing belief in the falsehood of equal opportunity and the equally false notion of easy upward mobility, as well as the widespread acceptance of racist and sexist ideas, help to explain many people’s acquiescence to gross inequalities in society and continuing discrimination. This ideology sanctifies wealth and greed as reward for good behavior and good decisions and helps to explain, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen.”

To Wall Street, which sorts risk by its ability to maximize profit, “adaptation” to climate change simply means learning how to profit from it. And there are a variety of ways of doing so—for example, rebuilding after flooding offers a boost for the construction industry as does the building of coastal defenses against rising seas, already occurring along the East Coast of the United States. Miami is spending $400 million for pumps and other infrastructure to prevent flooding. Hoboken, New Jersey, received a $230 million federal grant to shore up protections, and Norfolk, Virginia, received $100 million from the federal government to carry out a plan to protect neighborhoods from flooding. All of this spending adds to the measured national economic growth (GDP) and thus is seen as positive—even when the reason is negative.

[...] One of the growing areas of financial speculation is the issuance and trading of so-called catastrophe bonds, referred to as cat bonds, offering insurance against catastrophic weather events as well as other types of disasters such as wildfires. The $72 billion in cat bonds in 2016 is expected to double in the next few years.

Under capitalism, efforts to ameliorate or reverse the damage caused by ecological rifts and disturbances all have a common element: the underlying cause of the problem cannot be questioned.

Discussing countering Soviet influence in the Middle East:

The President Eisenhower said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect.

In the 1960s, the U.S. government stole hundreds of thousands of acres from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in order to build dams in the Missouri River watershed. In the process, “hundreds of Indian families from various tribes were forcibly relocated and their way of life completely destroyed."

What we should really be worried about is the system of capitalism, not robots or our humanity. What has been shown to give people true happiness—control over our own lives and creative and socially meaningful work, participation in community activities, and time with friends and family—has decreased through longer hours at work, less control over the workplace environment, always-on connectivity, more job insecurity, longer commutes to and from work, and an unachievable quest for satisfaction through ownership of consumer goods.

When women audition for symphony orchestras, they are more likely to be accepted if the selection committee is unaware of their gender. Women software developers are considered better coders than their male counterparts if “their peers didn’t realize the code had been written by a woman.” And students judge a professor teaching an online course more favorably if they think that she is a he.