Everything I Know: Buckminster Fuller (1975) | Hacker News Reader

Everything I Know: Buckminster Fuller (1975)

bfi.org

183 pointsColinWright16 comments

Does anyone know of an organization that is actively trying to Push Buckeye's ideas? Or are there a number of different ones? I strongly believe the premise that we could easily take care of everyone in the world with a minimum of effort if we worked together. And when I say "we", I mean the 10-20 percent of us who have been gifted with the ability to do science and engineering beyond the grade school level. Let the rest of the people play.

https://www.bfi.org/

How are Buckeye's ideas different from Fuller's? Were they contemporaries?

I'm guessing that was an autocompleter mangling "Bucky".

Could I suggest reading Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society, or at least, watch this short interview about his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok

I would say the Long Now Foundation [0] is influenced by Fuller and his ideas, carrying forward the values of planetary systems engineering and long-term thinking. It's a little farther afield (or crackpot depending who you ask), but The Venus Project [1] covers similar ground. And of course, while Fuller never explicitly advocated UBI, Yang and COVID have recently conspired to move the idea into the Overton Window.

[0] http://longnow.org/

[1] https://www.thevenusproject.com/

Worth noting that the time frame this was published (1975) was just at the point in history that some (such as Peter Thiel) argue was the end of the rapid technological progress of the 20th century. It might be easy to conceive of a society supported by a technocratic few when looking back at a period of uninterrupted innovation and growth, but I wonder if Fuller would feel the same today when looking back on roughly 50 years of (relative) scientific stagnation (at least in some fields).

If curious see also

2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20488872

2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943883

2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401967

loved reading the old comments. ty!

sp332 on Dec 20, 2013 "Well you won't know which people have good ideas until they tell you their ideas :)"

For anybody else irritated by watching all of the short segments stitched together by the video player at the Internet Archive, I wrote this script to concatenate the mp4 segments and re-encode as a single mp4 file.

  #!/bin/sh
  
  DIR=$1
  
  BASE=$(basename $DIR)
  
  echo copying from $DIR to create $BASE.mp4
  
  # copy the files over
  mkdir $BASE
  cp -v $DIR/*.xml .
  cp -v $DIR/*.mp4 $BASE/
  
  echo done copying
  echo convert segments to ts files
  
  # convert all the mp4 files to intermediate transport stream format
  for f in $BASE/?????.mp4; do
      echo "$f -> $f.ts"
      ffmpeg -i $f -c copy -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb -f mpegts $f.ts > /dev/null 2>&1
  done
  
  # concatenate all the ts files and then re-encode them to mp4
  echo concatenate ts files and re-encode as mp4
  (cd $BASE;
   ffmpeg -i $(echo -n "concat:"; for f in *.ts; do echo -n "$f|"; done) -c copy -bsf:a aa  c_adtstoasc ../$BASE.mp4
  )
  
  # clean up
  echo clean up
  rm -rf $BASE
  echo done

I too got exposed to him via the Venus project and Robert Steele's "open source everything manifesto"[1]. Having read Jacque Fresco [2] and found it clear and easy to follow, I tried to read Bucky's book "ideas and integrities" [3], but his almost stream-of-conciousness kind of writing style is so opaque and non approachable (to me at least) that I had to give up.

Can you recommend anything from him that is more readable?

===

[1]https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Robert-David-Steele/dp/1583944435

[2] https://www.amazon.de/Best-That-Money-Cant-Buy-ebook/dp/B077...

[3] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004WH04LM/

"Earth, Inc." is less than half an inch thick.

Even though I'm a man of few words, I guess I've read a lot of material from various authors anyway.

But I only retained three books I picked up in the 1970's, and this is one of them.

Only read it once, and it's lasted my entire life.

Back in the 1990s, I saw an old video of Buckminster Fuller talking about a hyperloop-like transit system that would connect the entire world using the ocean floor, amongst other things. To this day, I always thought Elon Musk got his idea from this video, yet I’ve never heard anyone mention it.

It was a fairly common trope in "golden age" sci fi iirc, along with moving people roads, and people tubes (like the Futurama opening credits). Elon is straight out of a Robert Heinlein book - the crazy billionaire building rocket ships to mars, he's even made them stainless steel so they shine like on the old astounding adventures covers.

Edit: here's the roads must roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll one of those ideas that sticks in your head

He was a pretty awesome chap.

It is understood

That if you know that I know

How to say it "correctly"

(The exact meaning of which

I have not yet learned)

Then I am entitled to say it

All incorrectly

Which, once in a rare while

Will make you laugh.

And I love when you so much

Whenever you laugh.

But I haven't learned yet

What love may be

But I love to love

And love being loved

And that is a whole lot

Of unlearnedness.

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