Tibi. Bosserman3. Bosserman_2. 'People Don't Realize How Fragile Democracy Really Is' - James Fallows - Politics. Two days ago I mentioned the "Goodbye to All That" essay by Mike Lofgren, a respected (including by me) veteran Congressional staffer who had worked for Republican legislators on defense and budget issues for nearly 30 years. If you have not read his essay yet, please read it now. And then, please return! Among the important aspects of his essay is that it goes beyond one now-conventional point of "the worse, the better" analysis: that the GOP's main legislative goal is to thwart Obama, and if that includes blocking proposals that might revive the economy, so much the better for the Republicans next year.
More fundamentally, Lofgren argues that today's Republicans believe they are better off if government as a whole is shown to fail, not just this Democratic Administration. Republican hard-liners might seem to have "lost" the debt-ceiling showdown, in that they wound up even less popular than the Democrats are. Further on the implications of this soon. The newsonomics of Netflix and the digital shift.
Editor’s Note: Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says he is surprised that customers weren’t more upset with Netflix’s digital shift. After all, he expected more upset, in his role as a pioneer, early in the game of forcing the digital shift. That’s the kind of digital shift now confronting news companies, so Netflix’s customer experience and strategy is highly relevant. Hastings is quite clear in that strategy, telling investors on Monday: “Believe it or not, the noise level was actually less than we expected, given a 60 percent price increase for some subscribers.
When Netflix shocked everyone by pricing way up DVD-by-mail subscriptions — up to a 60-percent increase — that’s what he was doing: forcing the digital shift. The economics of his business is clear. DVD-by-mail used to be the whole operation. Timing is a big question here.
Transit: The 4 Percent Solution. A new Brookings Institution report provides an unprecedented glimpse into the lack of potential for transit to make a more meaningful contribution to mobility in the nation's metropolitan areas. The report, entitled Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America, provides estimates of the percentage of jobs that can be accessed by transit in 45, 60 or 90 minutes, one-way, by residents of the 100 largest US metropolitan areas. The report is unusual in not evaluating the performance of metropolitan transit systems, but rather, as co-author Alan Berube put it, "what they are capable of. " Moreover, the Brookings access indicators go well beyond analyses that presume having a bus or rail stop nearby is enough, missing the point the availability of transit does not mean that it can take you where you need to go in a reasonable period of time.
Brookings did not examine a 30 minute transit work trip time. Economists Peter Gordon and Harry W. Notes: 1. 2. 3. 4. The New Austerity and the EROI Squeeze. By Eric Zencey The government of Minnesota has shut down thanks to a $5 billion budget gap. Wisconsin public employees have been de-unionized so their salaries and benefits can be cut to close a budget gap. New Jersey just missed shutting down as a Democratic legislature and a Republican governor agreed that austerity cuts are needed (though there’s still going to be some wrangling over how the pain will be distributed). Last week the Italian cabinet signed off on $68 billion in austerity cuts. Though not a single politician or mainstream economic analyst has ever made the connection, the new worldwide austerity in public spending traces to a physical cause, as measured by change in EROI — energy return on energy invested. Even more troubling than oil’s 20:1 global average is the figure for new oil, just 5 to 1.
Wind and other renewable energy sources offer returns in the seventeen-to-one range — still a nice income flow, but nothing like the flood we once got from oil. Is the austerity wave related to Peak Oil and a lower return on energy? The classic and mainstream left position is: the current austerity wave is a direct result of the financial crisis and the need to bailout financial capital, and working people have to pay for this. Steady-state economists have a different explanation: the failure to extract cheap and abundant energy after Peak Oil, is the fundamental cause. This explanation means that even without a financial crisis and bailout, we would still face lower living standards. My own take is that both processes are occurring at the same time, and that one of the underlying causes of the current crisis is indeed Peak Oil. However, given stronger social power, one could adapt society’s spending in ways that would not only be socially just, but would lead to socially and culturally richer societies; and of course this cannot be done by spending a reduced pool in priority to the richest strata of society, which is the hyper-neoliberal program now being carried out in Western countries.
Priorities in a declining empire « unsettling economics. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1954. “The Economic Crisis of the Tax State.” International Economic Papers, 4; reprinted in Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1991. The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press): pp. 99-140. “… public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society.
The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare — and this and more is written in its fiscal history.” Following Schumpeter, the budget debates illustrate the kind of life that the rich and powerful wish on the rest of society. The one area that the Obama is willing to rein in military spending is on medical care for the troops — at least Robert Gates emphasized that approach. What is weird is that virtually nobody with access to the public media is talking sense.
Like this: Like Loading... Researchers identify seventh and eighth bases of DNA. For decades, scientists have known that DNA consists of four basic units -- adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. Those four bases have been taught in science textbooks and have formed the basis of the growing knowledge regarding how genes code for life. Yet in recent history, scientists have expanded that list from four to six. Now, with a finding published online in the July 21, 2011, issue of the journal Science, researchers from the UNC School of Medicine have discovered the seventh and eighth bases of DNA. These last two bases -- called 5-formylcytosine and 5 carboxylcytosine -- are actually versions of cytosine that have been modified by Tet proteins, molecular entities thought to play a role in DNA demethylation and stem cell reprogramming.
Thus, the discovery could advance stem cell research by giving a glimpse into the DNA changes -- such as the removal of chemical groups through demethylation -- that could reprogram adult cells to make them act like stem cells. Facebook Investor Roger McNamee Explains Why Social Is Over. Agoraphilia. The industrial revolution as an energy revolution.
Jobs for a frugal economy. This was originally proposed in a letter to President Obama: Excerpted from Warren Johnson: “What is needed is a way of creating jobs at less cost and use of oil. This could be done by encouraging the creation of sustainable ways of life by offering assistance to those who would like to live in the simpler, more cooperative ways that can be supported with renewable energy. The industrial niche is growing crowded even as it is being consumed with the depletion of the fossil fuels that made the Industrial Revolution possible in the first place. The opening we have is in the sustainable niche that supported human life prior to the industrial era, and will do so again after the fossil fuels are gone, and with the larger amounts of renewable energy that modern technology can make available on an ongoing basis. The cost of assisting those who would like to develop the sustainable niche will be small compared to creating jobs in the growth economy. Why files need to die.
Files are an outdated concept. As we go about our daily lives, we don’t open up a file for each of our friends or create folders full of detailed records about our shopping trips. Create, watch, socialize, share, and plan — these are the new verbs of the Internet age — not open, save, close and trash. Clinging to outdated concepts stifles innovation. Consider the QWERTY keyboard. It was designed 133 years ago to slow down typists who were causing typewriter hammers to jam.
Today we use computers for everything from booking travel to editing snapshots, and we accumulate many thousands of files. The file folder metaphor makes no sense in today’s world. A file is a snapshot of a moment in time. So it’s no wonder that as we try and force this dated way of thinking onto today’s digital landscape, we are virtually guaranteed the pains of lost data, version conflicts and failed uploads. It’s time for a new way to store data – a new mental model that reflects the way we use computers today. Time.
India-China-Africa. Future. A surprising convergence result. Poor countries have access to new technologies already developed elsewhere so should grow more rapidly than richer economies. This is one of the implications of standard growth models, as well as of common sense. But in reality, there is no automatic tendency for economic "convergence" among countries at different levels of income. Convergence depends instead on a number of additional determinants. It is only those developing nations with the "appropriate" preconditions – for example, adequate schooling or physical investment – that manage to absorb new technologies sufficiently rapidly and therefore to catch up. In the language of growth economics, there is conditional convergence, but not unconditional convergence.
When we look at the same question at the level of individual industries rather than countries a surprising finding emerges. Suppose we focus on, say, plastics, furniture, or the auto industry in developing countries. Adaptation and Viability. Tuesday The Tacoma Narrows Bridge completed in 1940 suffered catastrophic failure as a result of aeroelastic flutter. A few more words about failure, if you will. Some days ago in Complex Systems and Complex Failure I wanted to make the point that, while failures in complex systems may have simple beginnings, the actual collapse of the complex system is as complex as the system itself. There is a sense in which this is logically, even tautologically, true. A complex system can’t be said to have experienced catastrophic failure until it has been compromised across a broad range of functionality. Here is my formulation from Complex Systems and Complex Failure: “Complex systems fail in complex ways.
There are many ways that this might be formulated. Ultimately, the failures of complex adaptive systems are as interesting as the complex adaptive systems themselves, and so these failures merit a careful study. There are pragmatic analogues to these theoretical forms of failure. Like this: Debtors'sPrison - Rentier vs Debtor.
Currents - A Weird Way of Thinking Has Prevailed Worldwide. Michael Hudson - rationale for high taxes on unearned income. The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) Existence is elsewhere. — André Breton, “The Surrealist Manifesto” 1. The Juice David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler’s arrest. (a) the film was bad; (b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or (c) Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.[2] As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany.
DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. ERROL MORRIS: Why not? Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops | Magazine. In 2003, officials in Garden Grove, California, a community of 170,000 people wedged amid the suburban sprawl of Orange County, set out to confront a problem that afflicts most every town in America: drivers speeding through school zones. Local authorities had tried many tactics to get people to slow down. They replaced old speed limit signs with bright new ones to remind drivers of the 25-mile-an-hour limit during school hours. Police began ticketing speeding motorists during drop-off and pickup times. But these efforts had only limited success, and speeding cars continued to hit bicyclists and pedestrians in the school zones with depressing regularity.
So city engineers decided to take another approach. The signs were curious in a few ways. In other words, officials in Garden Grove were betting that giving speeders redundant information with no consequence would somehow compel them to do something few of us are inclined to do: slow down. A feedback loop involves four distinct stages.
How Not to Play the Game. It’s been more than a year now since the theme of “green wizardry” became central to the posts here on The Archdruid Report, and I’ve pretty much covered the first two of the three themes I mean to discuss before it becomes time to shift the conversation elsewhere. We’ve discussed organic gardening and its associated arts, and we’ve discussed homescale energy production and conservation. At this point, before we go on to the third leg of the tripod, which used to be called “recycling” thirty years ago and deserves a more robust name now, I’d like to step back for a moment and talk a bit about strategy.
Yes, there’s a strategy underlying the selection of projects and possibilities I’ve been discussing here. The fast version of the take on the future I want to discuss divides it up into four overlapping phases or periods, labeled according to the basic modes of economic production that predominate during each one. Not, it’s probably worth noting, into revolution. Why I don't like crowdsourcing. To put it bluntly, to my ear "crowdsourcing" sounds like "flock milking". I don't like the term and I don't even like the concept it stands for. But there's more than what I personally like or dislike. I believe that this concept is not going to survive. It simply doesn't match with the multitude movement. It will be operational in the transition period between the old and the new economy, mainly instantiated in corporate activities, as they try to take advantage, in their own logic, of the new technology.
See history of the term and concept in Wikipedia. In fact, we can see that this concept evolved from outsourcing, which is part of the old language, with a well defined meaning within the old paradigm. Crowdsourcing came from the realization that companies (i.e. closed and hierarchical (feudal) organizations) can use the new technology to coordinate input from a very large number of entities, including a mass of individuals. There are two important patterns of crowdsourcing By t! Ransitioning towards an economy of meaning. What are the social implications of economic collapse? The end of consumerism? | Money.
Vertical Integration and Moore’s Law for AtomIns. Playable Archaeology: An Interview with Telehack's Anonymous Creator. Lawyers Settle... for Temp Jobs. The Archdruid Report. Robin Good on Digital Curation. Homebrew Industrial Revolution, Chapter Seven: The Alternative Economy As a Singularity. The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (9781439266991): Kevin A. Carson. Front Page | vox. Protopia. The downside -- and surprising upside - of microcredit. Anything but water. Larry Sanger Blog » Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?
Economics. Could Fast Food Automation Replace Low Wage Workers? « econfuture | Future Economics and Technology. Scenarios for Future Transitions: A P2P response to Global MegaCrisis scenarios. COOK Report for February - April 2011. Plagues and Peoples (9780385121224): William H. McNeill. Macroeconomic Resilience. Crony Capitalism: Macro-Parasitism under Industrialization. Walter Mosley: How to Put America on the Right Track.
Center for Science, Technology & Society -Toward Global Knowledge... “Industrial Legislatures”: Consensus Standardization in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions. Blogs for Research. Michael Thompson. Singularity. Epocal Change.