America is a complicated country, but it isn't nearly as complicated as India. India has 22 different languages spoken by over a million people per language. It has more ethnicity and religion than we can shake a stick at. So full employment for me is an objective, and it's an objective that I think can be achieved, particularly if we start eradicating waste, we stop the export of jobs, and we go toward a fully green economy. And by that I mean it's time that we get serious about creating communities and products and processes that are green from end to end.
I believe that corporations within 10 years need to be required to take back the waste. When someone is done with a refrigerator that they've paid for, that refrigerator goes back to its producer -- it does not go into a trash heap. And I believe that we're on the verge of a design revolution in which we find that not only will forcing this on corporations improve their design and their engineering, but it will actually lead to products that then become a mix of biodegradable and repurposable.
Rob: That sounds good. Now you mentioned...
RDS: it's common sense.
Rob: You mentioned India. Now you said that you think India is where the first open source everything economy could...it's not that the economy, it that the first open source everything manifesto could manifest. Could you talk about that?
RDS: Well, I mean first off the future is going to be defined by Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and some wild cards...most of which are Muslim, such as Nigeria and Turkey and Malaysia...also and South Africa. Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, which is where I finished my last two years of high school....Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew is on record as saying that 'demography, not democracy, is what is going to define the future.' And I think he's absolutely right. To that I would add the South Korean precept, which is that 'educated demography is going to define the future.' To that I would add my own contribution, which is 'educated demography applying open source principles is going to dominate the future.' And of all of those countries I named from Brazil to Russia and including, of course, Indonesia and Iran, I think India is the one country that is capable of a very fast break out. Richard Stallman is one of the people I admire -- he's told me by email that he's had several very productive visits to India and they have indeed understood him when he pointed out to them that the only affordable open source system for the universities is an open source system, or in his words, a free software system. I won't quibble with the definitions. But my definition of OSINT is that it is free and open for everyone to see and use and they can repurpose it, but if there are financial constraints under the creative commons license then those financial constraints must be respected. And that actually makes sense because more often than not, the person who created that open source software is going to be the best person to monetize it. But that's a violation across many fronts today -- most people are not honoring the creative commons license and they're free riders and they're taking advantage. But if I had to pick one population, one government, one place to lead an open source revolution, I believe it would be India. I think India has the government, the educational system, and the culture of complexity that would most rapidly make India the first 21st century country if they adopted these ideas.
Rob: Okay, I'm going to throw some terms that you use in your book at you. Localized bottom-up resilience network...networks.
RDS: Alright, well first off I notice with interest that every new house in New Hampshire now has a generator built in. And that's because the centralized power grid fails with certainty. One of the things I've discovered in helping our intelligence network think about different things since it was founded in 2006 is that almost every industrial system is roughly a 45% to 55% waste. In the centralized electricity and energy network that we have, roughly 50% of the energy is lost from point of generation all the way to point of use. In mega agriculture, roughly 50% of all food is lost from the mega farm to the processing centers to the supermarkets to the homes to the trash. And the same appears to be true in health -- PriceWaterhouse Coopers has an excellent report on how 50% of every health dollar is waste. And again, it's waste because government pays bills based on cost plus.
And so these corporations, which are legal in the perverted sense of the word that we have today, just like it's legal to not have student loans written off by bankruptcy, just as it was legal for Advanta to change its rates from 1% to 29% if you had a single late payment -- I mean these are crimes against humanity. Advanta disgusts me -- it makes me want to puke. But what we really need to do is understand that if we do localized bottom-up crafting of agriculture -- there are 12 core policies and they're listed at earth-intelligencenetwork.net, that's earth dash intelligence.net. but I'll just name them: agriculture, diplomacy, economy, education, energy, family, health, immigration, justice, security, society, and water. Now these are core policies that have been in all of the mandate for leadership books for the last 4 or 5 presidential turnovers. There are obviously many other policies that need to be considered. But these are the basic ones. And if you take agriculture and water as an example, these are policies that tend to be developed in isolation from one another, believe it or not. There is absolutely no one being serious about understanding the true cost of mega agriculture, or the true cost of Monsanto and its poisonous seeds -- its suicidal seeds. So localized bottom-up resilience comes with, among many other benefits, the mandate to nullify all of the criminal and idiotic regulations coming out of the federal government. Small town butchers for example, they have been put out of business by regulations designed by the mega animal industry to put small town butchers out of existence. So if I were a small town mayor or if I were governor of a state, I would absolutely nullify all federal regulations for anybody who is working strictly within state boundaries. If they are only working within the state boundaries, the hell with the federal government.
Rob: Okay, so let me get this straight. You're advocating elimination of federal regulations overall or can you be more specific?
RDS: No I can't, now don't ask such a silly question. Obviously this depends on a case by case basis.
Rob: Well you're really good at coming up with rubrics and models and that's why I'm thinking maybe you've got one for this. Your books...
RDS: Look, localized bottom-up resilience demands that the community make its own rules. I would never in a million years seek to tell a community what its rules ought to be. But what I will absolutely tell any community is it can do better than the federal government has done.
Rob: That sounds like a big project...a big obstacle getting away from federal regulation.
RDS: I don't think it's a big obstacle at all if you just do it. One of the things local communities have to start doing is taking the power back. For example, communities in New York have regulated against fracking, and they have absolutely driven the fracking industry nuts. Now fracking is a crime against humanity -- it poisons aquifers and it causes earthquakes. But we have state legislatures and state governors who are all too happy to be bribed in looking the other way and putting the interest of the fracking industry above that of their own public's. So in New York State, we have a successful example of local communities looking at the facts, making up their own minds, and legislating their own protective measures against fracking. That's what every state should be doing across all of the policy areas.
Rob: Now another example would be Vermont requiring labeling of all GMO foods...
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