–Why the cloud is is not the future. A return to face-to-face roots

Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
=====================================================================

I’m first to admit it. I’m a long way from geek status. Oh, about a million years ago, I did some rudimentary programming, but came before a whole lot of yesterdays. So I hope you’ll straighten me out if you think I’m headed in the wrong direction.

This “cloud” thing may be all the rage these days, especially with the proliferation of “smart” phones and pads, but I think the cloud is a dead-end street.

Essentially, the so-called “cloud” is a remote computer. You input a problem to your local computer, whether a PC, a smart phone or some similar device. Your device sends the problem to a remote computer (the “cloud”), which deals with the problem and returns the results to your local computer.

The “cloud” offers several advantages:

1. People can get the speed and storage advantages of a huge computer, while they themselves may need own a minimal, comparatively inexpensive, send/receive device.
2. Efficiency: Because of worldwide time differences, one central cloud computer can service people ’round the clock. When New York works at its maximum, Tokyo may work at its minimum.
3. The costs of maintaining and updating a cloud computer can be shared by thousands of users, who themselves don’t need continually to buy updates and service.
4. Cloud users have access to thousands of different, specialized computers, each providing unique services.

I can sit at home with my little PC, and using the cloud peer into all corners of this planet, including a ground-level view of most streets in America, while listening to thousands of music selections and keeping track of the stock market in real time. No way could my little smart phone handle that kind of assignment by itself.

To those who predict the cloud to be the future of the Internet, the following article may give pause:

When Will the Internet Reach Its Limit (and How Do We Stop That from Happening)?
By Larry Greenemeier

The number of smartphones, tablets and other network-connected gadgets will outnumber humans by the end of the year. Global mobile data grew 70 percent in 2012. Yet the capacity of the world’s networking infrastructure is finite, leaving many to wonder when we will hit the upper limit, and what to do when that happens.

There are ways to boost capacity of course, such as adding cables, packing those cables with more data-carrying optical fibers and off-loading traffic onto smaller satellite networks, but these steps simply delay the inevitable.

Imagine you’d like to find the cube root of 24,875. You have choices. One is to use your own computer, which if it has a root calculating function, will give you the answer: 29.19136230407+.

Or you can use the cloud. You can transmit the problem to a computer somewhere in Asia. It will do the calculation and transmit the answer back to you, thereby using up a tiny fraction of the world’s Internet capacity.

If enough people use the cloud, instead of their own device, the Internet will hit that “upper limit” Mr. Greenemeier mentions.

The solution is to make the infrastructure smarter. Two main components would be needed: computers and other devices that can filter their content before tossing it onto the network, along with a network that better understands what to do with this content, rather than numbly perceiving it as an endless, undifferentiated stream of bits and bytes.

Said simply, the first solution is little more than “do it yourself.” Instead of asking the cloud to compute that cube root, go back to the old way: Use your own device.

The second solution is far more sophisticated.

Scientific American recently spoke with Markus Hofmann, head of Bell Labs Research in New Jersey

How do we know we are approaching the limits of our current telecom infrastructure?
The signs are subtle, but they are there. When I use Skype to send my parents in Germany live video of my kids playing hockey, the video sometimes freezes at the most exciting moments. In all, it happens more frequently lately—a sign that networks are becoming stressed by the amount of data they’re asked to carry.

We know there are certain limits that Mother Nature gives us—only so much information you can transmit over certain communications channels. That phenomenon is called the nonlinear Shannon limit. Within the next four or five years—we will exceed the Shannon limit.

How do you keep the Internet from reaching “the limit”?
The most obvious way is to increase bandwidth by laying more fiber. Instead of having just one transatlantic fiber-optic cable, for example, you have two or five or 10. It’s very expensive—you need to dig up the ground and lay the fiber, you need multiple optical amplifiers, integrated transmitters and receivers, and so on.

Mr. Hoffman then goes on to describe a “smarter” Internet, which led to the following question:

Even if a smarter Net can move data around more intelligently, content is growing exponentially. How do you reduce the amount of traffic a network needs to handle?
We might move to a model where decisions are made about data before it is placed on the network. For example, if you have a security camera at an airport, you would program the camera or a small computer server controlling multiple cameras to perform facial recognition locally, based on a database stored in a camera or server.

Instead of bottlenecking the network with a stream of images, the camera would communicate with the network only when it finds a suspect.

See where this is headed? The solution to the inherent, quantum limits of the cloud, is to use non-cloud computing.

The cloud is a small, though fundamental, step for the Internet, something that always will be with us. But I predict, for longer term growth, we’ll return to our roots: More and more local computing.

Today, the cloud involves massive, two-way communication, between your little, relatively “dumb” local computer, and huge mainframes geographically distant.

But, one day, your refrigerator, your stove, your bathtub, every piece of clothing in your closet, every board, wire and pipe in your house and yes, even your own body, will contain micro-chips that will calculate and communicate with each other short range, and together will comprise one big, local computer, with a rated speed in Geopflops (a thousand, trillion floating-point operations per second). Each of your neighbors would have the same. The world will be filled with billions of personal “mainframe” computers.

And if your personal computer doesn’t know the answer, it first would ask your neighbor’s computer, in a short “off-the-grid” communication. And your neighbor’s computer might ask his neighbor’s computer, in a kind of local, crowd-sourcing exercise.

The cloud will be like a highway between distant cities — used seldom and only as a last resort — while the vast majority of traffic will be within each city block.

The future is not to devote all the time, money and brains building an ever wider highway for distant communication. Yes, we may need that, but the future is not the cloud. The future is to devote that time, money and brains merging our surroundings and our selves into individual, local computers, which will communicate locally, the way people have communicated for thousands of years.

That’s what I think.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================

Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone. Click here
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

10 Steps to Economic Misery: (Click here:)
1. Maintain or increase the FICA tax..
2. Spread the myth Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. government are insolvent.
3. Cut federal employment in the military, post office, other federal agencies.
4. Broaden the income tax base so more lower income people will pay.
5. Cut financial assistance to the states.
6. Spread the myth federal taxes pay for federal spending.
7. Allow banks to trade for their own accounts; save them when their investments go sour.
8. Never prosecute any banker for criminal activity.
9. Nominate arch conservatives to the Supreme Court.
10. Reduce the federal deficit and debt

No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia.
Two key equations in economics:
1. Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
2. Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY