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When others know you better than you know yourself, I call that power.
CBC asks: How much data privacy can you expect to have? I’d like to see a shift to a debate which treats as the relevant question: How much information asymmetry can you expect not to have? Or alternatively: How much machine-readable/queryable/”mineable” data can a consumer or end-user expect to be on the receiving end of?…
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Quotebag #90
“Perhaps this should also serve as proof that the market doesn’t always work in the favor of what’s desirable. Que: “That’s not the TW00 free market capitalism!”,”—Julia Riber Pitt “Consumerism is not a byproduct of human nature; it is a disgusting system which turns human actions into malicious transactions.”—Anti Consumerism “And while you would not…
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The trouble with Android
Or as I’ve started calling it, Spamdroid. Too little sense of open source culture among Android devs. The overall tone one senses at Google Play is reminiscent of the DOS shareware community circa 1990. There is every imaginable combination of beggarware, crippleware [sic], adware, demowarez, etc., but added to all this, data mining, behavioral profiling,…
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Only the good (blogs!) die young
I am pleased to add to my blogroll the apparently defunct blog No More Sunsets. The most recent post there was titled Back soon and dated July 16, 2012, with the text I’m in the process of moving so I’ll be out for the next couple of weeks. I hope the author is doing OK.…
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Dollars are not votes
There seems to be an uptick in businesses being used as soapboxes (Papa John’s, Whole Foods, Chick-Fil-A, ad nauseam); most often conservative soapboxes, since conservatism is the ideology of the business establishment. Time for us non-conservatives to circle the wagons…but one side’s boycott is always the other side’s buycott. At best it’s a wash. Frustration.…
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Quotebag #89
“As for the libertarians themselves, we must not be shocked that they re-iterate the Sumerian division between the elect and the debt-bound with the devotion appropriate to a middle born climber.”—Crow Falls Down “A hierarchy is a machine — basically a steam engine straight out of the factory age — for compelling people to do…
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Quotebag #88
“Just be careful to keep your Hipster Gland in check. You don’t want to do the interview ironically.”—Matthew Benson “Revolution is illegal by definition and its adherents are routinely criminalized.”—blackorchidcollective “Some cultures used similar terms for ‘ripping someone off’ and ‘profit.’”—Unlearningecon “Honestly, the area of economics is still a soft science. Part of what we…
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Getting tired of the blowhards who say “I’m not against unions, just public sector unions”
I’m left first and libertarian second. Why? Quite simply, I consider that combination of priorities to be an under-served market. The opposite set of priorities has enough spokescritters and doesn’t need the addition of my voice to their choir. I’m also, nominally, an American. In my country the word “libertarian” has been distorted to mean…
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Engagement with the anagorist(s?) on free markets
This is my take on Kevin Carson’s Engagement With the Left on Free Markets recently re-posted at C4SS. The left-styled libertarians seem to see themselves as the best of two worlds; those being “statist leftists” and “libertarian rightists,” which can also be referred to as “vulgar socialists or liberals” or “vulgar libertarians.” The implication often…
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Quotebag #87
“what this means, as a practical matter, is that financial independence is not really in reach for huge numbers of workers. people live with their parents, or in terrible places; they go without health care; they can’t be prepared for emergencies; and they scramble. it is pepper-sauce in the wound to call these workers lazy,…