Advanced Housing

In the U.S. we consider our society to be an advanced civilization.  What qualifiers are we using to support this claim?  Well, we have advanced technology.  I could not, in good conscience, say that our behavior is any more advanced than the average ancient society though.  How about necessities?  We produce 5 times the food that we need (60% of which is exported and 20% of which is wasted).  We are definitely advanced here, though it does little good if there are still people starving.  I think that we are also fairly advanced as far as clothing goes.  Clothing is pretty simple; if it keeps us decently covered, sufficiently warm, and well protected from the elements, it is about as good as it can be.  Anything beyond that is beyond necessity.  The last true necessity is shelter.  We have some pretty advanced temperature management, and for the most part, our houses protect us from the elements, but there are some problems that are clearly less obvious than they should be.  This is what I would like to discuss.

I have been interested in and exposed to a lot of different types of houses in my life.  This has mostly been with reference to building materials.  Most modern houses in the U.S. are built out of wood.  In some areas, you can find houses or apartments made chiefly out of cinder blocks (our current apartment is made from cinder blocks), but they are less popular, because they are not well insulated.  Large buildings are often made from reinforced concrete, but these buildings are not typically used for housing.  On the whole, a vast majority of U.S. dwellings are made from wood.  This leads to a number of common problems.  The first is vulnerability to fire.  Wood houses are easy to burn down, and accidental fires are a major cause of accidental house destruction.  In many areas, wildfires cause panic, because of the fear of houses being burned down.  The second vulnerability is susceptibility to invasion of other life forms.  Wood houses are almost impossible to effectively seal.  Many animals, bugs, and insects have the capacity to make holes in wood, and some even eat wood as food.  This makes wood houses susceptible to rodent, termite, and ant infestations, among a large range of other creatures.  Another life form of concern is mold.  Damp wood makes an ideal habitat for several dangerous types of mold.  Third, wood is a fairly weak material compared to what is currently available.  If it is dry enough to prevent rot, it is brittle and can be damaged by various stresses.  These stresses are common in some areas, in the form of earthquakes.  The average one story wooden house will probably survive a moderate quake fairly well.  Adding another story or two will make the typically wooden house a dangerous place to be during an earthquake.  In addition to this, wood does not insulate very well and also is not very airtight.  As such, extra effort has to be expended to insulate and seal wooden houses, and even a well insulated wooden house must expend a lot of energy on temperature control.  The point is, wood does not seem to be a very good material for building houses.  Maybe the only real benefit is that it is easy to work with, and it can be produced fairly cheaply.

Now I want to look at how ancient civilizations handled this particular problem.  Early civilizations (some might even call them pre-civilizations) lived in caves.  Caves are very expensive for temperature control, and they allow all sorts of creatures in.  On the other side, they have no vulnerability to fire.  As civilizations started to develop, many moved out of caves and started living in tents, typically built from wood and skins.  These were vulnerable to everything, except earthquakes (if it falls down, just pick it back up), but they were highly mobile.  From there, most civilizations started making wooden buildings, of which we have already discussed the wide range of vulnerabilities.  These were more permanent and fairly cheap to build, especially in quantity.  Occasionally things like fires would wipe out whole sections of cities, and most houses were infested with something (a major factor in the spread of disease).  Some civilizations actually skipped wood though, and there is evidence that many others advanced from wood to other materials.  The final evolution of shelter for most ancient civilizations was stone or some form of concrete.  The largest native American civilizations built primarily out of stone, a superior form of concrete which we still have not managed to reproduce, or adobe, a form of clay used as a concrete (some may claim that this is because they had no other option, however, evidence has been found that prior to stone and concrete, wood was a common building material in ancient America; unfortunately, because wood decomposes fairly quickly, the extent and duration of building with wood is almost impossible to determine).  These materials are fire proof, earthquake resistant, and are much easier to seal than wood.  They are also not a form of food for pretty much anything, and they are very difficult to dig or burrow through.  Another benefit is that they impose a large degree of natural temperature control when built correctly.  We have found that our wooden houses decay into worthlessness in between 100 and 200 years, without constant maintenance.  Houses built of stone and concrete have lasted thousands of years with absolutely no maintenance.  Till recently, stone and concrete has been the highest level of evolution in materials for building dwellings.  Ironically our "advanced" civilization is still building mostly out of wood.

So, we think we are more advanced than ancient civilizations.  If this is true, shouldn't we be building houses of even better materials than they did?  What materials do we have that are better than stone and concrete, that can be used to build houses?  Stone and concrete are actually pretty good building materials themselves.  We already use a somewhat superior version of those for modern buildings.  We reinforce our concrete buildings with metal, in the form of rebar and remesh.  Our concrete is not as good as some ancient American civilizations, but we still have not figured out how to reproduce what they made.  Where we really excel is in making metal in large quantities.  It turns out that steel shipping containers make good houses.  Multiple containers can be combined to make houses of any size, and they can be stacked several stories high.  They are already fairly well sealed, and adding a thin layer of foam insulation will further seal them as well as insulate them very effectively.  We could be making houses out of reinforced concrete or even metal.  I already mentioned the benefits of concrete housing, metal housing is even better.  Metal housing needs insulation more than concrete, but with foam insulation, it does not need much.  Metal is extremely resistant to invasion by any other life form.  It is fireproof.  It is earthquake proof.  Metal houses that are well sealed with a layer of foam insulation will last forever.  Metal is a bit more expensive than wood or concrete, however there is already an existing industry making shipping containers, and containers that are no longer suitable for shipping are often still suitable for building houses with.  In short, production could be scaled to make them cheaper, and used containers are already reasonably priced, compared to the cost of building a wood house from scratch.  The logical progression of house material evolution is metal, and we have everything we need to do it.

There are some other amusing, but promising options.  Some people build houses out of straw bales.  This sounds counterintuitive, and it is.  Straw bales are so dense than they don't burn well.  They don't rot because they are installed dry, then covered in a thick layer of stucco to protect them.  Their density makes them pretty structurally sound, and they flex enough to withstand earthquakes fairly well.  Straw (not hay) is very low on nutrition, so most animals will not eat much unless they are starving.  Further, if the stucco is applied correctly, nothing will be able to get in to infest the straw.  Straw also makes extremely good natural insulation.  Unfortunately, straw prices have increased recently, but during good economic times, straw is often very competitively priced, compared to materials use for making wooden houses.  It is hard to imagine straw as a superior building material to wood, but the evidence indicates that it is.  It is also renewable, just like wood.

Really, we don't necessarily have to one-up ancient civilizations to be truly advanced.  Concrete, even without metal reinforcement, is an excellent building material for houses.  It is also very cheap.  In some 3rd world countries, notably Pakistan, some entrepreneurs have bought small cement mixers and concrete block molds, which they setup at the side of roads on the outskirts of large cities.  They then proceed to make large numbers of concrete blocks at a very fast rate.  These blocks are used to build illegal houses, which even the very poor can afford, because concrete is so cheap.  These small single room houses can be built at a rate of several a week, with a small operation.  This technique for building houses is very scalable, so long as the houses have only one story.  In short, concrete can be used to build very resilient houses, at a very fast rate, and very cheaply.  Using casting techniques can increase customizability with only moderate cost increases.  With casting rebar and remesh can be added to increase strength, again at a moderate cost increase.  Concrete is extremely versatile, as it can be used to produce houses with a very wide range of quality.  While metal is probably the most advanced material we can build houses out of (currently; maybe carbon composites will be even better), concrete is possible the most superior when cost and versatility are taken into account.

Why do we still build houses out of wood, if there are other superior materials that are often cheaper?  Tradition.  Seriously though, the main reason we still use wood as the primary material for building houses is that we have been doing it for so long.  People like the aesthetic of wooden houses, even if the wood is not visible.  Things like sloped roofs are difficult to build in any material, but they are common with wooden constructions because wood is structurally weak, and sloped roofs can handle the weight of several feet of snow, while flat roofs made of wood might collapse.  Wood is easier to make sloped roofs with than metal or concrete.  Wood is fairly cheap, and our building industry is well scaled to use wood.  In most areas, obtaining enough wood to build a house is fairly easy with mostly local sources.  Obtaining enough concrete to build a house is more difficult.  Metal is difficult to work with in a raw form, so unless parts are prefabricated, no one wants to build with it.  It is just more convenient to build with wood.

Another big reason we still use wood is legal building codes.  This is a tradition thing as well.  Legal building codes all assume that houses will be built with wood.  Running electrical wiring in a storage container house is not that difficult, if code allows the metal body of the house to be used for grounding.  Unfortunately, because code assumes that houses are not built of metal, a separate grounding wire is required, which increases the difficulty of running wiring in a house where the walls do not have space between them.  In addition, even metal houses must comply with electrical codes designed to prevent house fires, even though metal is fire proof.  There are already some difficulties using modern building materials to properly outfit a metal house, and building codes that assume houses will always be made of wood eliminate most of good solutions.  This is also a problem with straw bale houses, because they don't normally have space between the walls either.  By basing legal building codes on outdated assumptions, we have effectively stalled technological advancement in house building materials.

Is there some way we can fix this?  Well yes.  First, building codes need to be more flexible.  They could either be expanded to address requirements on a per material basis, or they could be abstracted to replace specific requirements with abstract requirements that allow more flexibility.  If it is absolutely necessary that current wood-based building codes maintain their strictness, the first option would be the best.  This strategy would require the addition of a new section for each new material that is added to the list of possible house building materials (so, if someone decides to build a carbon composite house, a new section of building code would have to be added to cover it).  If it is more necessary to maintain flexibility for adding new materials, then the second option would be better.  The downside with this plan is that it would probably leave loopholes that could result in a decreased standard of quality for wooden homes.  One way or another though, building codes need to be flexible enough to accommodate new building materials in a timely manner.

Second, we need to get over the wooden house architecture attachment that our society has.  Beautiful architecture is great, but if it comes at the cost of safety, it is not worth it (in my opinion, most wooden house architectures are far from beautiful).  Safety aside, it is possible to have beautiful architecture without wood.  We can easily look to middle eastern architecture, where wood was and is very scarce, to find beauty without wood.  Some versions of the ranch architecture, which is popular in the south western U.S. take much of their style from the abandoned adobe cities found in that region (in fact, stuccoed ranch style homes look very much like the ancient adobe houses).  Some ancient architectures that originally used marble or granite for the building material would work very well with concrete and are considered by many to be the most beautiful architectures the world has ever seen.  Even many parts of Europe have houses built from brick, which use an architecture not far removed from U.S. wooden houses.  This is evidence that we would not have to change the wood architecture much to get something more friendly to superior building materials.

There is a third hurdle, which is possibly the biggest.  Even if we get building codes up to date with modern technology, and even if people can learn to think beyond the modern wooden house architectures, our builders lack training to build out of anything but wood.  So, this is not entirely true, but for a majority of builders in the U.S., it is.  We build using wood because it is all we know.  Evidence that we are less advanced in this area than previous civilizations is that we don't have a robust stone masonry profession.  Bricklaying has become more of an art form than a building profession (we paste more bricks to the outside walls of wooden houses than we use to actually build walls).  I can hear some people saying that someone has to know how to make concrete structures, because that is what large buildings are made from.  This is certainly true, but they don't know how houses.  The small part of our building industry that makes concrete structures only makes big buildings.  We have amassed great amounts of knowledge of how to most effectively build wooden houses, but we know little about effectively making houses out of anything else.  Overcoming this hurdle is going to cost.  Training does not come for free.  In addition, to learn how to do things right, we will have to do them wrong a few times.  With concrete or metal, the cost of mistakes will likely be small, but they will be irreversible.  Even a big mistake is unlikely to result in the collapse of a house, but it could result in things like water leakage that requires regular sealing (water leakage in concrete or metal is far less bad than wood, but it can still cause humidity issues that might result in mold or damage to personal belongings).  That said, these issues already regularly occur in wooden houses, even if best practices are observed, due to the nature of wood as a building material.  If we don't start building with new materials though, we will never figure out how to do it right.

These three problems will ultimately be expensive to overcome.  Changing building code to make it keep up with technology will take a lot of political pressure, which ultimately will cost at least in time if nothing else.  Changing people's perception of architectural aesthetics will be even more difficult.  As with anything new, until the market for superior houses sees a lot more business, the cost will be fairly high.  Houses built from anything but wood will be treated as custom work until popularity increases.  Training is inherently costly, and this cost could be more problematic than either of the other problems.  When working with new materials, mistakes are bound to be made.  While the cost of these mistakes may be lower than the cost of maintaining wooden structures, they will be perceived as very high (we have gotten used to the costs of maintaining wooden houses).  This will hinder general public acceptance of houses built from new materials.  These three hurdles have a kind of synergy that will make overcoming them even harder and more costly, but the end result will be worth it.

As I mentioned before, most urban houses in Pakistan are built from concrete, and on the outskirts of urban areas, many illegal houses are built from concrete blocks.  These (fairly large) concrete blocks cost well under a dollar a piece to make.  The small illegal houses are typically made from twenty or thirty of these blocks, and they have only one room.  The cost to the "contractor" for each house is less than $30, for materials, and since labor is cheap, the total cost per house is probably well under $100.  The land is free (the land is technically owned either by the city or the province, which is part of why the houses are illegal).  In the U.S., we cannot get away with the "free" land thing, but if we learn to build using concrete, we could still reduce the price of housing dramatically.  One problem we have in the U.S. is high expectations for standard of living.  If you think that electricity, running water, and one bedroom per person (with a double sized master for a couple) is normal, you are deluded.  Most of the people in the world live in houses without running water, with little or no electricity, and with only one or two rooms for a family of four or more.  Now, I am not saying that we should live like that too.  What I am saying is, we should be happy enough to have electricity and running water, if our children have to share rooms, big deal!  In fact, most people end up spending most of their lives sharing a room with a spouse (or something).  If we give every kid their own room, we are doing them a disservice.  They need to get used to it (no wonder so many relationships fail shortly after getting into shared living arrangements).

Another problem is that we do not know how to handle concrete in a modular manner efficiently.  Our concrete building industry uses a technique that I am going to call "large casting."  This involves building wall molds, then pouring in the concrete.  Once the concrete is set, the molds are removed.  In essence, the walls are constructed by making very large custom molds, which are destroyed after the walls have been made.  We should all know that custom made anything is more expensive.  For buildings, large casting makes sense, because the height of buildings makes more modular techniques less safe and very difficult.  Houses are not large buildings though.  Even two or maybe even three stories will work with more modular techniques.  The Pakistani method of creating concrete blocks that are used to build will work fine if they are not stacked too high and do not have to be lifted very high.  The benefit of a modular system like this is that you can take the cement mixer to the building site, cast the blocks, then build the house, without needing to make a custom mold.  That last part is the key.  Making those custom large casting molds takes a lot of training to do right.  If the builder could just buy five or ten pre-made block molds (like builders in Pakistan), they would no longer need the labor of expensive concrete workers.  This is a big cost reduction.  If the block molds left holes in the blocks, rebar could even be added after stacking the blocks, to reinforce the structure.  In addition, concrete, in bulk, is cheaper than wood.  This is a further cost reduction.  Some of the cost reduction would be offset by higher costs for things like insulating (foam insulation would be mandatory to provide a vapor barrier, and because you cannot tack fiberglass to concrete very easily), but eventually the overall cost would be reduced as other industries scaled to the new materials.  In the end, houses could be built faster, cheaper, and higher quality, all at once.  With steel shipping containers, it is even easier.  Construction would be reduced to moving the containers, welding multiple container constructions together, insulating, wiring, and finishing (ok, HVAC as well).  Instead of building houses, it would be more like converting an existing structure into a house.  In short, once industry scales to new building materials, their cost will drop and probably to less than prices for current materials.

There is one other potentially major benefit to building with concrete and steel instead of wood: it is more green.  Right, I can hear you asking "how?"  Well, let me explain: Wood is a renewable resource (sounds like I am arguing against myself).  It has many uses.  Concrete is not officially renewable, but the materials it is made from are extremely plentiful and easy to obtain.  Steel is not so plentiful or easy to obtain, but there is plenty of steel in industrial waste, and further, I suggest that the ideal steel houses would be built from shipping containers that are no longer fit for shipping but still have a high enough structural integrity to build with (for shipping, they have to be able to stack many high, when full of heavy cargo; in contrast, houses would not stack more than 3 or 4 high and are mostly empty space).  So building with shipping containers is a form of recycling.  Now, we still have the wood thing to deal with.  A great deal of wood goes into building.  The processing for construction quality wood uses a lot of energy (sawing, drying, chemical treatment, creation of plywoods, etc...), and chemically treating wood introduces contaminates into the environment.  Instead of using wood for building, we could be using it as a renewable energy source.  Burning wood is a carbon neutral means of producing energy (so long as trees are replanted).  Coal power plants are already well qualified for burning charcoal, if not straight wood.  Technically, it would do no harm to allow non-carbon byproducts of wood burning loose in the atmosphere (these byproducts will mostly fall to the ground and be absorbed as new trees grow), but if people are concerned, the filtering methods currently becoming popular would work on charcoal smoke just as well as coal smoke.  So, building with concrete and metal reduces byproducts of processing wood for building, recycles certain metal products  at a very low cost, and frees up a major renewable resource for energy production.  All of this is in addition to the potential for reducing the cost of housing and making housing safer.

The only real things in the way of this are building codes and a high initial cost to get the industry going.  The benefits are greenness, lower long term housing costs, and consequently improved economy (reducing housing costs reduces long term debt, which increases discretionary income, which increases consumer spending, which, according to economists, is what drives a good economy).  We need to start pushing for our governments to extend or reduce building code laws to facilitate construction using advanced modern building materials.  The benefits of building with advanced materials clearly outweigh any costs.

IGMO?

What is Indirect Genetically Modified Organisms?  Well, it is a term I just invented, but it is a process that was invented millenia ago.  Nearly all of the food that we eat is, technically, genetically modified.  Now, the term GMO, used in a legal sense, means an organism that is the consequence of directly manipulating the DNA of another organism.  Most GMO used currently modifies plants to make them resistant to strong herbicides, so that the herbicides can be used to kill potentially harmful weeds without harming the main crop.  The main argument against direct genetic modification is that the consequences of directly altering DNA are not well understood.  In theory, it is possible that a single very minor change to DNA could cause the production of a toxic substance in a plant or animal, that could make it unfit for human consumption.  While there are regulations in place requiring extensive testing, it is impossible to comprehensively test to ensure that nothing harmful is being distributed to the public.

Indirect Genetically Modified Organisms use a less intrusive method for altering DNA.  In fact, when the process was invented, DNA had not even been discovered.  Today we call this process "selective breeding" or "animal husbandry."  It takes advantage of the ideas behind natural selection to modify an organism to be what we want or need.  This takes longer than direct genetic modification, but it is also more reliable and predictable.  The interesting part is, nearly everything we eat is IGMO!  Cows, pigs, and chickens did not magically start out as domesticated farm animals.  Non-IGMO turkeys are scrawny, with tough meat.  There is evidence that wheat did not even start out as a grain (it would have been similar to amaranth and other pseudo-grains).  In fact, it is possible that the true grains in general are entirely man made.  Similarly, most vegetables and fruits we eat are the result of thousands of years of IGMO.

Is there anything we eat that is not IGMO?  Probably.  Most foods that are not deliberately cultivated by man are probably not IGMO, though it is almost certain that we have had some impact on them (through our impact on the environment).  Most fish are probably not IGMO, though, we do not know if previous civilizations might have practiced some kind of selective breeding with fish that were then let back into the wild.  Also, some fungi, like truffles, are still gathered in the wild, which means that they are probably not IGMO either (it is possible, however, that liberal gathering of easily visible truffles may have unintentionally caused genetic selections that resulted in making them extremely difficult to find; that said, pigs like truffles too, so it is equally likely that wild pigs caused this trait).

I would say that it is almost certain that man has had some kind of genetic influence on pretty much all food that we eat.  I would not use the term IGMO to refer to foods that have not been intentionally modified though.  So foods that have only been genetically modified as a side effect of our environmental impact or gathering patterns would not be IGMO, but foods that we have deliberately selected for specific traits would be IGMO.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is: There is very little food that we eat that has not been deliberately genetically modified by humans.  The means of genetic modification are varied, and it is possible that some are safer than others, but it is all still genetic modification.  I am not saying that we should not be skeptical of direct genetic modification used in the food industry, and there are plenty of reasons to oppose it besides potential toxin risk (for instance, some U.S. companies donate GMO seeds to 3rd world farmers to get them dependent on the better growth properties of the seeds, then stop donating and use patent law to extort money out them).  What I am saying is, fearing GMO for its own sake is absurd, because nearly everything we eat is some kind of GMO.

Is Socialism Inevitable?

A while back I wrote about how industrial automation is reducing available work.  I expressed my opinion that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and I showed how aggressive automation will eventually make widespread welfare essential to our economy and even survival.  I have gained some new information and insight on this subject, and I would like to revisit it.

First, I would like to summarize the automation thing.  As more and more processes are automated, more and more work is eliminated.  (Note that I prefer to say that work is eliminated, not jobs.  This is because jobs is an abstract idea that is subject to interpretation.  I could have twenty people do the same work that one person would do and create a bunch of jobs, but they would be worthless jobs.)  If we take this to its logical conclusion, eventually every piece of work that can be efficiently automated will be.  Machines will produce everything necessary for survival.  The catch is that there will be almost no work needed to maintain production.  In other words, there will not be enough work necessary to justify employment of a majority of the population.  The only option to maintain a stable economy (and survival) will be a robust welfare system that provides aid to a vast majority of the population.

Now, I recently read an article on "prosumption."  Many U.S. businesses have started having customers take over many roles traditionally filled by paid employees.  The article even talks about a restaurant where the customers cook their own food.  It is really little more than a combination kitchen and grocery store, scaled for the use of many people at once.  This allows the restaurant to hire fewer employees by making the customers do most of the work.  It turns out that not only is this strategy profitable, but many customers find the novelty of the experience enjoyable.  Unlike automation, this strategy does not reduce work.  Instead, it eliminates jobs by getting people to work for free (see why I differentiate between work and jobs).  Just like automation though, it alters the balance of monetary flow towards businesses and away from consumers.  Ignoring automation and taking this trend to its logical conclusion, everyone will eventually spend a majority of their time paying a lot of money to work for free.  This will eliminate most jobs, which will ultimately have the same impact as automation.  Now, I will admit that, unlike automation, this trend is unlikely to play out to its logical conclusion, but it is also very unlikely to go away.  It will probably eventually reach a balance where people start to realize that they are working for free and will be unwilling to go beyond certain limits.  They will still be willing to do some work for free though (for instance, self checkouts, where people work as their own cashier).

Together, these two trends have a synergy.  Automatable work will eventually be automated.  Most non-automatable work can become the victim of prosumption.  Cooking is very hard to automate due to different tastes and things such as allergies.  It is clear from the above example, however, that many people are willing to cook their own food in a restaurant environment.  Pumping gas is also difficult to automate, because every car has the opening in a different place, but most people in the U.S. have already been trained to pump their own gas.  With the advent of cheap 3D printers, more and more people will be able to do the work of engineers and artists, in creating their own products.  There will always be a few jobs that will have to be paid, most of which are high end engineering jobs and machine maintenance jobs (someone has to keep the automation working).  In the end though, automation and prosumption can together eliminate a vast majority of jobs.

What happens then?  Well, as I mentioned before, if there is not enough paying work to go around, there are two options.  Either most of the people starve to death, or those with all of the resources give to those without.  If the people starve, there are no consumers and the economy collapses.  If the economy collapses, no one has enough resources, the machines decay, production stops, and even the most rich die of starvation.  For society to survive, it is mandatory that the resources of the rich be distributed to the general population.  When there is barely any work available, it will become necessary that people be provided things which are necessary for survival, without working jobs for the privilege.

Now, I am not saying that full blown communist socialism will be necessary, and in fact, I think it would cause exactly the same problems here that it has caused everywhere else.  A highly socialized system truly is inevitable though, if we can manage to avoid economic collapse long enough to get highly automated.  We may even be at the tipping point already.  For most of the last decade, unemployment has been high.  The latest trend has been steadily increasing or at least high but stable unemployment rates.  This has lasted long enough that the numbers are beginning to get skewed as unemployed people give up on finding work and are no longer counted as unemployed (unemployment only counts people who are actively looking for work).  Experts keep thinking this trend is going to turn around, but the evidence is not supporting that conclusion.  It is possible that we have finally hit the point where there is literally not enough work to go around.

I believe that the recent recession is evidence that we are near or at the tipping point.  One major consequence of the recession is that businesses are becoming tighter with their money.  Industry in general is beginning to automate more to reduce risks associated with an unstable economy.  The more businesses can eliminate paid labor, the better they can handle fluctuations in the value of money.  In short, it appears that the recession has driven automation and prosumption forward another step.  We are seeing the result of this in unemployment rates that are not improving despite government efforts to stimulate the economy.  The current government shutdown has been predicted to cause more economic issues, as it has the last few times.  Further, government shutdown, regardless of impact on the economy, will make the economy feel less stable, which is very likely to push automation and prosumption even further.  If we are not at the tipping point now, we probably will be within the next year or two.

Currently there is a major problem with increasing welfare to mitigate the effects of extremely cheap production.  Our government has a huge amount of debt, and it does not have sufficient income to sustain a welfare system that is as robust as we need.  In part, this is because of bloat.  We have a huge number of social programs, many of which are unnecessary and several which serve the same purposes for different groups of people.  We need to reduce bloat by eliminating low value social services and by combining redundant social services.  This will not solve the problem, however.  The next step is fair taxation.  Besides the fact that it should be obvious that treating ethereal entities (such as businesses) better than individuals is wrong, the biggest potential source of taxable income is large businesses.  The problem is that large businesses also get more tax cuts than almost anyone else.  The only group that gets more tax cuts than businesses is the bottom of the lower class, who do not even make enough money to pay taxes at all.  The welfare system we need to support the huge population of unemployed that is likely to appear in the next decade or so cannot be supported by anyone except large businesses.  Ironically, it appears that taxing businesses exactly the same as individuals would fix this problem in a single shot.

We do not need stimulus to create more jobs.  In fact, stimulus does not work very well anymore, because large businesses use it to buy more automation (or to give bonuses to already overpaid CEOs), which actually eliminates jobs.  Government contract work can create some jobs, but typically not very many and only temporarily.  The problem is not that there are not enough jobs.  The problem is that there is not enough work to provide enough jobs.  In other words, jobs are becoming increasingly unnecessary to the survival of our economy and nation.  People still need to survive though.  The rich can clearly not be trusted to provide for the unemployed.  As such, it is necessary for our survival as a nation, as an economy, and as individuals, that a robust welfare system be created that is funded from the very top.  If this is not done, the ultimate consequence will be massive economic and then government collapse, along with mass starvation and probably violence.  Pure socialism is not inevitable, but without a good helping, we are in trouble.

Obamacare, worst fears realized

The worst fears of Obamacare have been realized.  For anyone that has not heard, President Obama has authorized, according to most sources, over 1,100 waivers to parts of Obamacare.  Despite the several years given to phase in Obamacare requirements, many businesses, including Congress, have chosen to wait to the last minute, and they have found it impossible to overcome the hurdles caused by their own procrastination.  To ease their self imposed pain, Obama granted various waivers that range from extensions on deadlines, to charging taxpayers for the costs, to general waivers of the individual mandate.

Having not read Obamacare (an impossible task for any working person, including the Congressmen who voted it into law), I do not know exactly what part of it allows this, but one thing is clear: the claims made that Obamacare is too open ended are true.  One of the biggest fears voiced in the original debate over Obamacare was that it was loaded with open ended government authority allowing for very broad interpretation.  Otherwise stated, it gave the government too much power without any explicit limitation.  Now, we find that Obamacare seems to allow the President to change it on a whim.  This is very disturbing, because it essentially allows the President, the head of the Executive branch of government, to make legislative decisions without any approval by the Legislative branch of government.  Republican members of Congress are trying to do something about this, but evidently the Senate Democrats prefer to give the President unfettered power, violating the principal of checks and balances that has kept our government stable and free for the last couple centuries, even if it means denying U.S. citizens valuable government services.

Now, there is another possibility.  Above I give the President the benefit of the doubt, and I lay the blame entirely on Congress for giving him this power.  Since I have not read Obamacare though, I am not actually certain that it grants this power.  If it does not, the situation is much more severe.  If Obamacare does not grant the President the right to exempt people and organizations from it, then Obama is usurping legislative power from Congress.  First, this is unconstitutional, and since Obama is under oath to uphold the Constitution, he should be thrown from office for violating his oath.  Second, I consider this blatant violation of Constitutional law, especially by the President of the United States who is sworn to uphold the Constitution, to be treason.  The penalty for treason is death.