Colman found me not so cheerful on The Future and this is the reason. Engineering is not working in some space free from the powers that be, free to work wonders in making processes less wasteful and more efficinet. And ideas are owned.
Another future is possible but one of the conditions is that the whole notion of intellectual property is stuffed in a wastebasket. And I working for such an outcome. I am after all a member of the Pirate Party. If someone missed it you are very welcome to donate. We have just finished the ballots and all money raised to the end of this week will go to printing ballots (they are paper and we will need lots of them), 3 euro gives about 1000 ballots. There are no rules preventing international donations. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
As our name suggests, we're for reducing working time. At the beginning of the 20th century, economists and humane employers discovered that reducing the hours of work led to productivity gains and was thus, in itself, a technological improvement. That's why I give workshops that I call the Work Less Institute of Technology.
But work-less technology is "BAD!" technology because the workers get to keep most of the gains from it. It's awfully hard for a corporation to erect a fence around it and install a turnstile. If left to itself, this "bad" technology would drive out "good" technology, such as scarcity engineering and life-time-shortening engineering. So the economics establishment has waged a relentless propaganda war against reduced working time policies under the banner of the lump-of-labor fallacy. Funny coincidence -- all the neoliberal think-tank hacks know the lump-of-labor claim by heart. Sandwichman
