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! 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.
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 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. 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. 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. 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. Facebook Investor Roger McNamee Explains Why Social Is Over. Agoraphilia. The industrial revolution as an energy revolution. The most fundamental defining feature of the industrial revolution was that it made possible exponential economic growth – growth at a speed that implied the doubling of output every half-century or less.
This in turn radically transformed living standards. Each generation came to have a confident expectation that they would be substantially better off than their parents or grandparents. Yet, remarkably, the best informed and most perspicacious of contemporaries were not merely unconscious of the implications of the changes which were taking place about them but firmly dismissed the possibility of such a transformation. The classical economists Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo advanced an excellent reason for dismissing the possibility of prolonged growth. They thought in terms of three basic factors of production, i.e. land, labour, and capital. Every form of material production involves the expenditure of energy and this is equally true of all forms of transport.
Source. Jobs for a frugal economy. This was originally proposed in a letter to President Obama:
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.
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. 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. 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. Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops. Income-Inequality. 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. Why I don't like crowdsourcing. Ransitioning towards an economy of meaning. What are the social implications of economic collapse? The end of consumerism? Blog Tool and Publishing Platform. 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. Protopia. And surprising upside - of microcredit. Microcredit, which involves giving small loans to very small businesses in an effort to promote entrepreneurship, has been widely touted as a way to reduce poverty and stimulate economic growth.
Anything but water. Larry Sanger Blog » Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?
Economics. Could Fast Food Automation Replace Low Wage Workers? « econfuture. Millions of people hold low-wage, often part-time jobs in the fast food industry. 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.
Michael Thompson. Singularity. Epocal Change.