Julius Goat: Principles scare the shit out of the GOP, and pragmatism doesn’t. For good reason. Martin Tisne Data rights should protect privacy, and should account for the fact that privacy is not a reactive right to shield oneself from society. It is about freedom to develop the self away from commerce and away from…

The unfortunately popular agenda of steering both resources and students from academic to vocational learning is all kinds of problematic. We need to fight the assumption that those are mutually exclusive choices. I see no reason very large numbers of people can’t have both liberal arts degrees and journeyperson cards. Life expectancy is more ample…

https://web.archive.org/web/20200422015312/https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/american-fascism-1-what-is-fascism-and-how-did-it-get-here/

The bootmaker will still be the authority concerning boots, so most likely there will still be apprenticeships. Hopefully in the future apprenticeships will put more focus on imparting skills and knowledge and less (really, none) on indenturing and hazing the apprentices, limiting access to learning (understandable as necessary economic self defense under the status quo…

Alan Mitchell: In fact, we do not have any data commons at the moment, where each party gets their fair share. Quite the opposite. We have data enclosures, where a few powerful corporations harvest data for themselves to extract its value in deeply unfair ways. Jason Stanley: [David] Horowitz’s free speech attacks on universities lack…

Computer literacy should absolutely be universal in the adult population and hopefully universally under development in the entire juvenile population. I’m not sure programming literacy is the most important component of this literacy. While there’s more than a little truth to the old saw “program or be programmed,” I’m currently more concerned about the level…

I suppose, like many in my age cohort (older generation X) I was a very early adopter of the Internet and later the Web and tend to have “old school” attitudes about many of these things. I think of web pages in general as possessing two cosmetically similar (sometimes identical) things that serve different functions.…

I think my age cohort (so-called generation “X”) was the canary in the coal mine. I’m over 50 and haven’t yet managed to land a job that’s not part time and/or temporary. Maybe it’s because I’m from a working class background and didn’t know any better than choose a liberal arts major. Maybe it’s because…

I learned in a recent discussion on Fecebook that the semantic web was discussed during the Telluride Tech Fest back in 2002. I’m not a member of the professional classes and don’t attend conferences and the like, but I certainly remember “semantic web” being quite the buzzword for a season or so. I looked it…

chilke: The ugly conclusion from [Mark] Blyth’s view, as I see it, is that is we cannot have full employment, otherwise inflation will inevitably be out of control. That is, we “need” a certain portion of the populace to be unemployed. I find this disturbing. It amounts to what is basically human sacrifice. Heather Marsh:…