Union-bashing in high gear in Michigan

The astroturf has really hit the fan here in Michigan.
The degree to which the television airwaves here have been
bombarded with union-bashing ads demonstrates impressively
deep pockets. My own pockets are literally empty,
but it is still possible to post stuff here for free,
so I decided to post some counterpropaganda of my own.
With any luck an audience of some sort will stroll in.

The last of the ads that I’ve seen is deeply offensive.
It portrays two workers in an apparent public sector setting,
where citizens stand in a long line for some service or another.
The two workers are abusive of the customers, and both are
apparently about to go on break per the just-won agreement,
leaving the folkx in line stranded for some time to come.

To add injury to insult, the astroturf ad also depicts
one of the workers with a noticeable gap between her teeth.
I don’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of an
insult to people of less-than-perfect cosmetic dentition.
I think it’s an insult to working people in general.

The American workforce has been enduring an aggressive,
systematic program of de-unionization that has been applied
without interruption for decades, having gone into high
gear about 1980. The period 1980-present has been literally
a gift to opponents of the labor movement, whether you
look at political, economic, social or informational trends. Yet the ingrates
piss and moan that it’s not enough. The balance of power
between management and labor has already shifted so
dramatically in favor of management that:

• Virtually every job comes with a contract. Contracts that are not collectively bargained are literally boilerplate.
• The human resources Establishment has access to a near-total information grid including medical, credit-scoring,
  address history, as well as machine readable (an important distinction)
  feeds from public record sources—usable information in the public domain
  about public corporations is of a very summary or ‘low-res’ nature, consisting of annual
  balance sheets and income statements in annual reports and prospecta.
  Private businesses are simply black boxes. Sometimes
  they have reputations of some sort, but beyond that
  and gossip, employment applicants are literally in an information vacuum.
• The role of legal noncitizen residents in America’s labor market is tightly managed,
  and on terms agreeable first to the employer (who has veto power over ‘sponsorship’),
  second to the government (which has veto power over ‘immigration status,’ which is contingent mostly on employment and
  sponsorship status)
  and the worker, who is literally an indentured servant.
  The managed migration ‘movement,’ like the ‘right to work’ ‘movement’
  behind the propaganda in question, threatens to disempower migrants worldwide
  to the even further unfair tactical advantage of management.
• Underground labor economics as a driver of human migration has gone largely unchallenged by immigration authorities,
  resulting in its degeneration into human smuggling, which is to say, slavery.
  When wages are based on what the market will bear,
  there is no automagically-enforced ‘natural law’
  to the effect that persons under duress are not economic actors,
  since it is apparent that many such persons
  function both as producers under indenture, as well
  as as a captive market for underground sheltering
  of so-called illegal persons.
• The trend from gainful to marginal employment continues worldwide, as well
  as the very real expectation that workers assume more and more of the risks
  inherent in enterprise.

If people in the center-right coalition that controls this country thinks that
the period from about WWII to Reagan was one during which members of America’s
unprecedented working-middle-class got more than their fair share
of economic security, they should do the intellectually honest
thing and step up to the microphone and state it explicitly,
or step out of the way of those of us who still dare to be

PROUDLY

PRO-UNION

02-Sep-2006 0230Z

As if Michigan’s current multimillion dollar union-bashing astroturf campaign
isn’t enough, tonight we got treated to the 60-minute long infomercial
for social darwinism re-branded as ‘libertarianism’ called 20/20.
So far I have watched the first 30 minutes, at which point I simply
had to dump some bile in my personal containment bucket, which is
to say the present blog.

The first half of the show has been a re-hash of all the cases against
teachers’ unions that have been the PR biz’ stock in trade for decades.
The ‘fact’ that competition brings out the best in people, the ‘fact’
that without competitive fires lit under their buns, human nature is
for all of us to be lazy and arrogant. This neoliberal ‘fact’ is almost
as insulting to humans as the neoconservative (Hobbesian or Straussian,
take your pick) insistence that, left to our own devices, we’d absolutely
slaughter each other and revert to something worse than warlordism,
or ‘anarchy,’ as the main$tream media insist on calling it.

First of all, the reason Belgium blows the doors off Amerika in
academic/intellectual performance is because Belgium is not because
educational professionals there have ‘freedom to fail’ (about
as astroturf and counterfeit a concept as ‘right to work’) but
because Belgium is a dramatically less socially conservative
(and therefore less anti-intellectual) society than Amerika,
where even something as core to human rights as the voting rights
act comes (repeatedly!) with an expiration date.

Anyone who’s worked in the real private sector (as in ‘defense’ contractors don’t count) knows that free market
competition is a natural meritocracy of salespersonship, manipulation,
kissing up to power/authority and general one-up-person-ship. Its effect
on things we should encourage, such as customer satisfaction, is certainly positive,
but obviously small compared to the effects of competitive pressure on
people’s best empirical estimates of whether they have the sheer luxury
of adopting virtually any normatively established variety of ‘best practices.’

My own vestigial (so far) career has been well over 95% private, for-profit sector, with
easily a private sector majority in agency/agency-customer customer base.
This is true, I would venture, whether the calculations are weighted by dollar or by hour.
The one job I had that was an exception was the work study job I had
at the university library back when I was a student there, many years ago.
This, not ironically, was the lowest-paid job I ever held.
Also not ironically, it was far more intellectually stimulating,
and I would venture more relevant to the real needs/wants of real people,
than any of the perma-temp or perma-part-time jobs I’ve done in
the bu$iness sector since then. I am only one person. I would certainly
not advocate concluding based on my experience that the public sector
is more public-spirited than the private sector, let alone more
meritocratic, cost efficient, etc.

Apparently I’m visible
8:12 AM EDT 18-Aug-2006
Yesterday we went to the library, so I did a little blogging.Yesterday’s session was especially fruitful–I actually got myblogger.com content to be ‘visible.’ Much to my relief, simplypasting one of the ‘sample templates’ from blogger actuallyaccomplished the task, although I hope to learn how to saythings like “add some whitespace as a margin” in bloggerese.I first became an Internet user (i.e. a netizen) way back in 1991,so I’m familiar with the concepts of FAQ, ‘newbie question’ and ‘bandwidth conservation.’ Even in those innocent times, theamount of bandwidth necessary to post just one ‘article’ to justone ‘newsgroup’ could literally cost the ‘net’ hundreds if notthousands of dollars. So by all means, if you’ve come up withsome minimalist synopsis of core bloggerese syntax, say a “pocketrefcard,” it would be better netiquette not to post it as a comment(assuming ‘my’ blog® even offers that level of ‘read-write’functionality) as chances are the information you’d be postingmight be somehow redundant by virtue of the fact that it’s alreadyincluded in some FAQ somewhere in blogger’s vast administrivial namespace.
Actually, we aren’t living in the Halcyon Nineties any more,so why not post it anyway? The fact of the matter is, the amountof SNR degradation inherent in such a post is trivial comparedto the amount of spam that I am obliged to shovel into the computersof visitors to ‘my own’ ‘web pages’ at Yahoo! GeoCities due to the fact that I am one of the ‘nonpaying customers,’ i.e. thetragic part of Tragedy of the Commons; one of the commoners.So on second thought, do, if you feel so inclined, use the present blog to share whatever tutoring or tutelage in bloggerese that you’re smart enough to know about.
I believe ‘my’ blog® actually does have the ‘two way communication’featurette turned on. Try clicking one of the underscore( _ ) characters where the “post comments here” linkoid ‘should’ be,especially if it’s a different color from the other characters.My short term computer programming education goal is to learnenough bloggerese to correct that particular cosmetic defect,ideally within two library visits.

Neo-slack and organized labor

yet another fan site

Recently the main$tream medium (and generally the “lighter” side even of it)
has noted (at least among some adult American males) an apparent comeback of the medium-generated “nineties” concept
that is Slack. We’re talking main$tream medium here, so that’s Slack as in
ers rather than ware.

The medium seems to think it has something to do with “drugs,”
although (lucky for America) the suspect drug (according to them)
seems to be coffee, considered (it seems) by the leading scientists or our time
to be a “soft” “drug,” but slackers and others (many others by my guesstimate)
should be alert to the possibility of medium stories about
findings that caffeine (or one of the other “drugs” in coffee)
is a “gateway” “drug,” or alternatively that the Internet is a “hard” “drug.”

The central topic (and yes there is one) to the present screed
is not the Drug Wars, but a pet hypothesis (which is only a hypothesis)
that Slack circa 2006 might be positively correlated with past
or present union membership, perhaps even more closely than with
membership in the male sex.

I suggest this because for most of my working own life
(say 1983-2002, which is getting REALLY SCARY here in post c.1980 Amerika)
I (mistakenly, it turns out) almost envied union cardholders
since in some cases their “severance pay” check was
bigger than a typical paycheck with my name on it issued
BETWEEN periods of unemployment.
Needless to say, any such envy is strictly past tense!

One of the reasons for this replacement of envy with a sense of militant solidarity
is the fact that the concessions being asked of trade unions and their members
today exceed literally by the better part of an order of magnitude those
concessions given away during the late-1970’s-and-early-1980’s-recession.
I think any sufficiently old person sufficiently familiar with the so-called real
world would (like me) peg that particular period of history as the locus
of the most intense and formative part of the 30(+?) year period
of restructuring of the so-called first world from timid experiments in mixed economy
to militant laissez-faire capitalism.

One thing I learned about humyn nature (at least as it applies to myself)
the hard way is a passing familiarity the theoretical economic
construct called “opportunity cost.”
Thanks to the dumb luck of falling in love with someone who grew up middle
class, which is to say the daughter (yesIam) of someone, not whose
“generation” (I prefer “cohort”) I envy in any sense, but whose middle-adulthood,
while scarred by Amerikan Apartheit, Militant Anticommunism, sex-typed occupational roles,
the old MIC, etc.,
was measurably better off by the scalar (i.e. one dimensional and therefore
at most narrowly relevant to anything) “yardstick” called “economic security,”
and to an even greater degree “job security.”

But as Ron March has stated so honestly and frankly, the
so-called postwar boom years (or as I call that period the golden
age of bennies) were White Affirmative Action, and a much
less modest form of affirmative action than the one I and
I hope sufficiently many others hope to defend by defeating
(hopefully by a more than decisive margin) the so-called
Michigan Civil Rights Initiative[sp?].

When our joint net worth went from negative to modest-but-noticeable
with the death of my father in “law,”
I found myself largely unable to resist certain
(but only certain)
temptations that come with having lower opportunity costs.
This partial failure on my part is partially due to failure
on my partner’s part to resist certain temptations to which she
her idealistic self (and she’s even more idealistic than me if you can believe it)
is especially vulnerable.
These would include her tendency to react to “I got the job”
almost as if it were bad news.
Many spats and also many less heated philosophical expositions
later, I started to get it about her rationale.
Danger begets more danger, it seems,
but what’s in the past is in the past.
“Sunk costs are sunk” seems to be one definition
actually agreed upon by account-ants and econo-mists alike.

Just now it occurred to me that a severance paycheck from
one of what’s left of the “union jobs” might noticeably (even if not seriously)
outweigh a (typically, though not always) nonexistent
“unemployment” check which just a temp might qualify,
at least following those periods of nonunemployment (“assignments”)
long enough for that particular “safety net” to kick in.
It has also occured to me that one side-effect experienced by people
(or even families in some cases) fortunate or unfortunate
enough to be among the unionized unemployed might be (in short term terms)
a drop in certain opportunity costs, such as the “steepness”
(can steepnesses be modeled as “costs?”) of “tradeoffs” between
various things one would like to be able to (looked at another way,
which IS relevant, “have the right to”) say about their next J.O.B.
I wonder if any empirical studies have been done re. opportunity
cost differentials among demographic subsets of the unemployed
population.

One “study” which I don’t consider empirical (but isn’t advertised as such)
is the “X and Y’ed duology(?)” of Barbara Ehrenreich, consisting
of Nickel and Dimed and its sequel Bait and Switched.
I have referred to these books as participant-observer studies.
By professional or scholarly standards they probably don’t even measure
up to that level of rigor, but no claims are made to the contrary,
and Ehrenreich is nothing if not generous with disclaimers.
She describes the first book to be about what “blue collar” work
is like in America, while the second book is about the sociology
of America’s “white collar” unemployed. Terms like “blue collar”
and “white collar” are inexact and therefore contentious.
I would describe $.05&$.1ed as about people with alternating
pink/blue stripes on their collars, and B&S as definitely
(based on multiple real world experience yardsticks) not
BS, but also definitely lacking the research-oriented focus of the first
book, although a substantial fraction of the level of prosecraft
of $… is present. She seemed there to get too lost in the $ubculture of
organized $alescrittership to find her way back to mainstream white collar America,
but I do think her observations there looks frighteningly similar to
my own best sober guesstimate of what the medium-term future looks like,
specifically the “worldwide best case scenario”
in what to me are “core quality of life issues.”

If Ehrenreich were to expand(?) the series(?)
to a trilogy(?) perhaps a worthy third subject of study would be
yet another sub²culture within the nouveau pauvre
subculture�newly unemployed persons on severance pay, or perhaps
on almost-gainful unemployment checks. In the strictest sense,
in the short term anyway, such persons are not (like, to a person,
the characters other than Barb in $…, literally) perpetually
calculating opportunity costs using the assumption (among others)
that getting a job offer effective yesterday is part of the opportunity
cost of non-homelessness, non-foodlessness, non-non-support of dependents,
or even (and this is the part that I think is SICK) that other pre-requisite
for being a somebody�non-carlessness.

Ehrenreich is trained in biochemistry and has more than a passing familiarity
with “higher” “math.” Maybe the reading public will get really lucky
and she will further multidisciplinarize in an “economic” direction, gaining passing familiarities with
utility functions, possibility frontiers, normative vs. positive issues, and opportunity costs.
This would be (I think) possibly a powerful methodological armamentum
for studying unemployed journeypersons. I can practically guarantee
it to be the core toolset for figuring out the latt�-sipping slacker set,
but Ehrenreich would (I imagine) be in danger of getting permanently lost in that thicket.

Maybe the caffeinated cypherpunks are ex-unionists.
Maybe the Today Show is spot on and they’re just slackers.
Maybe, like me, they think of themselves as vagrant netizens, although I prefer my coffee cheap, Black, and free trade.
(pick 2!)

At any rate, the window of opportunity for scholars or others
to study the “gainfully” unemployed and their economic
production and consumption preferences will most likely permanently
go the way of the study of the gainfully employed, which is to
say you may as well (restricting the discussion to “first world” countries, anyway)
make a project of studying the passenger pigeon.
I wouldn’t suggest that Barbara Ehrenreich is best qualified
for such research projects, but she’s certainly proven herself
more qualified in the relevant disciplines than, say, Katie Couric.

The Slack is Back

According to the “keep it loose, keep it light” crew of cheerleaders at the Today Show,
the slacker concept is making a comeback.
Apparent voluntary unemployment has been observed in American adult males by people in the social sciences.
I’m sure if they look they’ll find a few female slackers too.
I say apparent because I am strongly of the opinion that the methods of guesstimating
unemployment that are used by government agencies and apparently many scholars,
are simply fraudulent.
Part of the reason for this is the use of a fraudulent definition of voluntary.
The unemployment statistics from official sources are based on a definition
of an unemployed person as an unemployment insurance-eligible worker
(which is to say a worker who has broken out of the rut that is the contingency labor market)
whose strategy for getting re-employed includes using the placement services of the unemployment insurance system.

An intellectually honest estimate of employment would have the following features:

• u=1-(p-j)/p,
  where u is the unemployment rate (on a scale of 0 to 1–multiply by 100 for percent),
  p is the number of working age adults in the economy,
  and j is the ‘effective’ number of occupied full time jobs in the economy.
• Adults who are dependents of others can be subtracted from p only if the voluntary nature of their nonparticipation
  in the workforce can be verified.
• Filling a permanent full time job with benefits increases j by 1.
  Filling some other type of job increases j by some number between 0 and 1.
  Terminating (with or without cause) decreases j according to the same pro rating schema.
• In general, a 20 hour per week part time job should be considered 0.5 of a job.
• Likewise for a 6 month per year seasonal job.
• A job that pays 0.5 times poverty line also counts as half a job.
  I suggest using the number of minors divided by the number of working-age
  adults as the number of dependents for calculating poverty line.
  The amount of intellectual dishonesty in the official definition of the poverty line
  and the CPI is also legendary…that however will be dealt with in a later post.
• A job w/o bennies counts as a full job (1.0 jobs) only if the compensation exceeds the poverty line
  by enough to buy bennies, at non-group rates if necessary.
• Jobs requiring overtime do not count as >1.0 jobs,
  because unemployment is not a measure of how
  much labor is being utilized, but how many laborers the market is failing to utilize.
  Frankly, unemployment (and its evil twin underemployment) is an indicator of market failure, not personal failure.

The Today piece, of course, is a condemnation of individuals, not the system,
toward which “they don’t bark and they don’t bite.”
Apparently the new nonworking class is into cybercafés, particularly the two
activities of drinking coffee and surfing the web.
This, I suppose, is par for the course for the morning babblefest that regularly
features financial sector cheerleader Jean Chatzky, who preaches retirement preparation
through coffee denial. Don’t forget Murphy’s law, the one that states:
“A penny saved is a penny.”
Coffee and tea have always been popular with economically marginalized groups.
I believe this is due to the popular belief that caffeine acts as an appetite suppressant,
making hunger more tolerable.
Read Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier for a fuller discussion of this.
The Internet appeals to marginalized people in general,
including the ideologically as well as the economically marginalized,
because (in spite of the damage done to its innocence and honesty by the Clinton-Gore-era commercialization)
it is still noticeably less main$tream and prostituted than any other means of communication so far.
For the record, I drink only cheap store brand coffee.
If you want to lecture me about fair trade coffee, hire me first.
I access the Internet only at the public library.
Perhaps in the part of the country where the Today show piece was filmed, the
suffocation of the public sector is even more complete than it is here,
so people have to fork $ into the hands of the cybercafé industry.
Hopefully at least they’re patronizing the non-chain joe joints.

Main$tream media types seem puzzled that some might find participation in the economy
as an employed or self employed person is not sufficiently palatable.
Main$tream media types themselves are of course employed. The on-camera ones for the most
part seem to be gainfully employed, although the number of back office media jobs outsourced
or otherwise deprofessionalized or contingentized I would imagine is steadily increasing
as it seems to be in all industries. People who work in visible parts
of the main$tream media are clearly de facto prostitutes, which is probably why they
don’t get it about the fact that normal people trying to survive in the real world consider the current economic situation
in America (not to mention the quality of life situation in general) to suck.

The trend from gainful (permanent, full-time, benefits)
to marginal (or ‘contingent,’ as the HR and PR whores call it) employment
has done much to shift the labor-management balance of power even more decisively in favor of management.
There are other labor market trends, probably also structural, which are just as unmistakable:

• The continuing deprofessionalization of scholars.
  For a detailed accounting of this trend, see the Invisible Adjunct website.
  It’s been frozen (made read-only) but last I checked it was still there.
  It’s a good read.
  With dramatically fewer jobs to be had in academia, the percentage of intelligent jobs outside the intelligence sector is plummeting.
• The explosion of the so-called dot com bubble (freeing up talent in the information sciences),
  followed by the Ultimate Pretext (9/11) for
  the further authoritarianization of society. The deprofessionalization of scholars
  slashes opportunities for nonproprietary research. Then the bubble bursts in commercial
  opportunities in math and computer science, mostly opportunities subject to proprietary controls over
  knowledge and the people who create it, but opportunities nevertheless.
  Then the inevitable happens (see Toffler, forgot whether it
  was “Third Wave” or “Future Shock”) and the pretext for dumb (i.e. main$tream) Americans to regard
  civil liberties and transparancy as things as luxuries the world can no longer afford.
  Now an even larger share of the jobs for technical professionals are classified.
• Main$tream media types like to make a lot of hay about American workers
  having a sense of entitlement and considering themselves “above” menial work.
  I can’t speak for Americans in general, but I certainly am not above doing low-skill work.
  I no longer have my resume on the “public” portion of the Internet, but I
  can assure you I have yet to score a job title more impressive than data entry.
  Non-college-type job descriptions in general are being more or less totally
  obliterated from all first world economies. Being a “lunchpail Plato”
  is no longer a viable alternative to accepting professional roles
  in (usually significant) service to austere and cynical (and in my opinion murderous) agendas such as Hobbesianism and Straussianism.
• The combination of immigration policies and security clearance policies definitely amplifies these trends.
  This has been clearly visible at least since the mid 1980’s, when I was an undergraduate math student.
  The large number of visas for international graduate students intensifies the competition over graduate
  school admission.
  United States citizenship as a requirement for a security clearance, combined with ma$$ive Reagan-era
  defense industry giveaways, meant Americans with BS and higher technigal degrees
  had no good reason (other than a value system that values published over secret research)
  and certainly no economic incentive to continue their education further, and non-citizens
  (especially in hopelessly spooky fields such as aerospace engineering) are barred
  from the lion’s share of non-academic technical jobs.
  This is ironic considering that in the present campaign to exploit the so-called unipolar moment,
  non-citizens are literally earning their citizenship in American military uniforms.

As usual the main$tream media whores blame individuals,
for the shortcomings of the System, which is clearly beyond repair.
They need to learn from Bob Black:

If you’re not rebelling against work,
you’re working against rebellion.

I owe my sanity to alternative media

I saw an interesting case study in information theory this morning.
It was interesting enough, in a human interest sense, to justify
attention from the media. For this particular informational
phenomenon the most imaginable of outlets for such information would
be the bottom feeders of the communicating arts’ intelligence as well
as SNR scales… the local TV news crew.

Basically, a gas station we passed in the course of certain routine
errands read 2.989, but (as synchronicity or station policy or
whatever) the `2′ was half blown away in the morning wind, and there
was clearly visible a (as of yet `unblown’) 1 over which the 2 had
obviously been pinned up.

Fortunately[?], the only TV station number I happened to have on speed
dial was WHPR, channel 33 (and FM 88.1) in Highland Park, MI. Not
that they wouldn’t necessarily take an interest in such information,
but their focus is talk TV, talk radio and TV-radio simulcasting, not
brain=dead quasi-journalism embedded in large amounts of (increasingly
blaring to easily 30+dB over `signal’) noise. Nevertheless, I had no
other apropos phone numbers handy, so I decided to give them a shout.

I had no idea what I might say to whoever might answer the phone at
WHPR. As I struggled with the bizzy signals I was rehearsing and
scripting an improv. It went something like this:

I understand you most likely don’t have truckfuls of news crews and
their gear zooming around the metro area as do your main$tream
colleagues, but you’re the only TV station I happened to have on speed
dial and I don’t have a phone book on me at the moment and I’m to
cheap (ie poor) to call directory assistance, and I just couldn’t
bring myself not to tell someone, and you’re the only seemingly
apropos someone I’ve got, so here it is: At 13-Ryan is (or was,
anyway) a typical graphical error containing a humorous mensaje about
humyn nature, as well as about the energy situation. To my continuing
disappointment with myself, I went out without a camera again. Since
you’re in the TV biz, I figured you might have one.

As it turns out, my call was answered not by a `person’ (which in
general and also in this instance bothers me not in the least) but by
(apparently) the call-queueing system for a call-in talk show. I
don’t know whether the number I dialed in on was for call-in or just
listening, but I elected to do the latter for a minute or two, even
though I didn’t even begin to have a script handy for an impromptu
talk radio (but on-air nevertheless) appearance.

After listening for about 10 seconds, I certainly resolved that if
someone did say `caller you’re on,’ I wouldn’t talk about anything
nearly so trivial as the price of gas, let alone humorous anecdotes
about the same.

The subjects under discussion during the (maybe not even) all of two
minutes that I heard were numerous, as the discussion was very
fast-paced and about subjects that interest me a great deal. In spite
of this shared interest (or perhaps because of it), I virtually
cradled my $ell phone and resolved instead to blog an entry about this
anecdote at such a time as I might get a round tuit. As can hopefully
be seen, that time has arrived and is now here, and I am now here at a
computer. Perhaps as soon as Friday (or as not-so-soon as a couple or
three months from now), you (whoever you might be) will be reading the
present text. Perhaps not.

There was something said about `politricks,’ specifically the brand of
politricks centered around conspicuous hiring, or what I call
`publicity hires.’ I can’t be sure, but I imagined it was a reference
to one of Governor Granholm’s recent spammercials in which she is
pictured with what seems like a few hundred new hires with the highway
department. From what I was able to gather based on `news’ coverage
of the `event,’ I was actually (mostly pleasantly, suggesting possible
red-over-black prioritization?) surprised that the jobs, while not on
the state payroll, were mostly nevertheless in the public sector at
the county or local levels. I’m actually largely undecided on
questions involving government de/centralization. In -general-, I
like to think of myself as a radical decentralist along the lines of
Paul Goodman (as well as of course Emma Goldman). In general, I like
to think of myself as someone who regards debates over centralization
versus decentralization of the public sector as akin to debates over
optimal rearrangement of deck chairs on doomed vessels. BTW, the
front page of today’s detnews.com had some stark numeric data (in many
point type) regarding the only-so-recent tragedy aboard Ethan Allen on
Lake George.

At any rate, I just wanted to shout out to cypherspace (whether it
matters or not) that I appreciate to a considerable degree the hard
work of people in alternative media. It’s some of the most thankless
work imaginable, due I think mostly to the tradeoff-oriented nature of
the humyn condition. The media industry in general seems to have a
higher SQ (salescrittership quotient) than most industries, which is
kind of [sic] ironic given the media’s reputations for flagrant
liberalism as well as the $ale$ community’s reputation for nearly the
opposite. Add to that the fact that the pressure to wax salesy is
invariably more burdensome (which is nevertheless seen as good news by
some) to small as contrasted with large places of business. Yet so
many toil so patiently in the world of micromedia.

Perhaps another world really is possible.

One small step for market transparency…

On 14 July 2006 I saw the Channel 7
Editorial presented by Chuck Stokes. The subject for that day was the
unnveiling of the web site michigandrugprices.com.

Imagine a database of no less than 30 often-prescribed medications
are tracked by price and vendor at the above website. A price
instance database of 30-some medications and maybe 30 or so (as is
so often the case) chain pharmacies and pharmacy departments. As
Stokes said, it’s a start. Nevertheless, I would imagine such a
database (perhaps even in the proprietary “.mdb” or Access�
format) could fit easily on a 1.44MB floppy. When I get a round tuit
I will visit the Michigan drug prices website and see how webstacled it
is.

Michigan law for some time now has entitled people to prescription
price quotes in person and over the phone. The mechanization of the
process using a website is important in that people now need not worry
if their requests for quotes are holding up the line at the pharmacy
counter. A website also has the potential to warehouse empirical
microeconomic data (price quotes) for a large number of medications,
and hopefully also a large number of pharmacies, both chained and
otherwise. The potential also exists to build a veritable
informational lens for the drug-using public. Perhaps some of the
techniques of modern portfolio theory can be used to match optimized
portfolios of pharmacies to consumers’ portfolios of prescriptions. This is a
more computationally intensive task than determining which particular
pharmacy has the lowest total price for a given individual’s market
basket of prescriptions. Such market baskets (or bundles) are
all-too-familiar to persons who have recently used online `databases’
set up for the purpose of matching Medicare Part D `recipients’ and
their vouchers to single insurance companies. When Part D was first
announced, the AARP was for it because they saw it as the best thing
for health care that also has short to medium term political
feasibility in the United States. I saw it as that, but more
essentially as a small step for the cause of
transparency and a giant leap for the cause of privatization, not
just of Medicare but of information.

Markets (in the sense of “the market for X” or “the going rate for X”)
are described (rightly or wrongly) as being on a scale
(depending on which “X”) from “monopoly” to “perfect competition.”
The former is characterized, according to theory, by
market opacity, price discrimination and high entry and exit costs.
The latter is characterized by transparency (understood to mean
both buyers and sellers are street wise regarding prices),
the “law of one price,” and open competition, unhampered by
(say) licensing (in either the IP or credentialing sense),
protection rackets, trade secrecy, and other barriers to entry.

Some of the least wealthy places and people have been getting some
medications at reduced prices, which is location-based (I forgot which
degree that’s supposed to be) price discrimination. This seems to the
pharma-ceutical industry to be more palatable than compromising their
strongly held political views on the subject of patents-in-perpetuity.
I speak as one who applauds price discrimination in favor of people
who need it badly, yet I am also a militant advocate of extreme
transparency, especially in consumer and labor markets. This
phenomenon is called “conflicting wants,” and is a disease of
normativists such as myself. Perhaps a world in which people of
modest means can benefit from immodestly priced pharmaceuticals is
only possible if the pharmaceutical marketplace is managed according
to a Providian-type business model, in which empirical data points
about the supply and demand curves (which contain the relevant information
about prices and their elasticities), especially in the aggregate, are
closely guarded proprietary information, which those members of the
public purchasing “prescription (or general healthcare) discount
cards” can access a few data points at a time, which it is claimed
(with `satisfaction’ guaranteed) results in smaller (`up to’ 70
pct. in some cases) outlays for covered (now you’re covered!) health
care products and services.
One must not misunderestimate the economic wisdom displayed by
President Bush in appointing Providian’s former chaircritter
to head up whatever investigative unit of the SEC was supposed
to address transparency and conflict of interest issues in the
financial markets.

Ceramics, in relationship to commercial art, art education and more.

I have recently been strugglin’ with questions about fair use. One
thing that has piqued that interest in recent weeks has been my
discovery of barcode wikia. Go look it up…learning new markup
languages is a slow process for Netizen Lorraine. Anyway, much of my
internal ethical struggle has centered around what some term
`derivative works.’ Roughly speaking, these are what happens when
original content collides with unoriginal concepts.

Obviously, the most openly derivative of creative pursuits has got to
be advertising. I reminded myself of this recently by diving into my
collection of VHS� tapes (I’m a vagrant netizen in multiple
ways…) and re-watching the 2004 US Open (golf, not tennis). At
some level, this violates my own conscience, no so much in my belief
that people somehow violate the intellectual property of others by
taping stuff off the television airwaves, but more by the guilt over
using such exotic (by the austere expectations of the vagrant netizen)
technologies as VHS�-licensed media and machines, which offer
capabilities beyond the most utopian fantasies of literally hundreds
of generations of samizdateli for something as mundane as men’s
professional golf interlaced with numerous golfomercials. I mean,
even if I never get around tuit and `re-constitute’ that setup I once
had rigged between our VHS� VCR and our modified Minolta�
video camera with the formerly proprietary handy-dandy electrical
interface to both the 12VDC power supply and the composite A/V signal
lines of the Minolta� portable VCR which unfortunately suppliable
at the gar(b)age sale where we had bought the camera. For a few
precious months I actually had live action montage capability,
although it was a very dim and lo-res one as there seems to be
something wrong, at some level, with the camera. To make a long story
at least a little bit shorter, the untimely death of our other VCR
necessitated unplugging our surviving VCR from the breadboard and
enlist it in the dreary work of taping stuff off the free (as in beer)
airwaves. When one is in love, one gladly makes such sacrifices.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about `derivative work,’ whatever that
might be. What triggered it was seeing a 2+ year old golfomercial. I
distinctly remember the ‘mercial from back then, but had forgotten
whose advertising campaign it was. Re-watching the 2004 USGAMO
reminded me that the advertiser in question was Lexus�. It was
about a wintersports enthusiast and occasional hitchhiker who was
discussing with his companion his interest (an academic interest, no
less) in ceramics. The punch line of the golvert had something to do
with minoring rather than majoring in ceramics.

A (seemingly) more recent incarnation of the witty deployment of the
concept of a `ceramics major’ as a concept in advertising is a recent
radio advertising insertion bankrolled by or for the National
Fatherhood Initiative. It’s part of their `be a dad’ campaign and
implores the audience “have you been a dad today?” The NFI blitz
describes many ways in which people[?] can earn their dadhood, at
least for a day. One is by driving home the point that a dad worthy
of the job title will evaluate investments in the education of his
offspring based primarily on direct applicability to careerism. In
this respect, in creative terms, the NFI advomercial is lifted
directly (and pretty much `whole cloth’) from the Lexus�
golfomerical.

It must be emphasized that I am in no way accusing NFI or its agents
of any kind of wrongdoing. I simply found one of their many ads to be
an amusing case study in the recycling of advertising gimmicks.
Another interesting case study involves Daimler und Chrysler… not
the present-day business resulting from the merger of DaimlerBends and
Chrysler, but the separate entities that existed prior to the vaunted
merger of equals. Shortly before the merger a Dodge� commercial
recyled Mercedes�’ cute (the first time) inclusion of rhinoceri
(or rhinoceroses) in a car commercial, the beasts in both cases
serving as an example of what’s out there, traffic-wise.

=Blogger Lorraine=

I finally got a round tuit and wrote a post for my Blogger account.
Perhaps it will be the first of many and perhaps it will be the only
one for some time. Since blogging has gotten a reputation for
opinionation, I’ll use the present message for the purpose of
clarifying my opinion system. In this context, opinion system
is to opinion as belief system is to belief.

It is my belief/opinion that belief and opinion are simply two words
denoting the same thing. Henceforth in the present message I shall
use the terms interchangeably, and probably use “opinion” more often,
since it generally connotes less gravitas and therefore should be more
accessible and less intimidating to others.

While I don’t generally endorse the idea of America’s “Founding
Fathers” as inerrant or otherwise uniquely qualified to set the human
rights or legal reform agenda of American or other people on a
“forever” basis, I do generally admire their ideas and the expression
of those ideas in some of their most well-known documents. One true
stroke of genius in the Bill of Rights is the first amendment. I
myself would have worded the part about freedom of religion more
explicitly, perhaps stating “wall of separation” instead of the
seemingly deliberately contentious “nonestablishment clause.”
Nevertheless, perhaps one can forgive the 18th century bourgeoisie for
using stilted 18th century language. The real stroke of genius in the
American Constitution is the devotion of one amendment (not more, not
less) to (in essence) “freedom of belief/opinion.” While the present
generation is torn end-to-end on whether the relationship between
church and state is characterized by “non-establishment” or (as I
would strongly prefer) a “wall of separation,” at least we aren’t
plagued by controversies over whether a given exercise of (expletive
deleted) authority is unconstitutional on mth amendment grounds
(for violating “freedom of religion”) or nth amendment grounds
(because people are entitled to their opinions).

I have decided that the present blog will be yet another opinion blog.
This is, of course, not because the world needs another opinion blog.
It is probably the same reason “opinion” and “blog” are largely
synonymous in much of the blogosphere:

* I need a “containment bucket” to contain my opinions, so that other
online resources that I use for samizdat (or samizdat lite) purposes
will contain less opinion and be less opinionated.

* Being naturally vain, I like having a modest informational space
(thank you Blogger) where I can map out my constellation of opinions
for comparison and contrast with other maps, many of which are well
established online and especially in the blogosphere.

Readers, if any, will hopefully forgive my amateurish and sometimes
jarring text formatting. I am a vagrant netizen, so simply learning
yet another interactive web site’s markup language can take multiple
library visits, which can amount to more than a month in meattime.

Much (perhaps too much) has been posted online concerning what I
shall refer to as “opinion taxonomy,” or perhaps more ominously
“ideology taxonomy” or “agenda taxonomy.” I shall start here
with a brief summary:

* Left vs. right

This is the most familiar, and probably also the most derided for
oversimplification. I happen to endorse it, partially for its
simplicity, but mostly for its solid consistency with life as I have
observed it so far. It seems that in every context there are insiders
and outsiders, overlords and underdogs, winning and losing track
records. It also seems that every status quo (statist or
otherwise) comes with its own tamper-proofing mechanisms designed to
protect the interests of insiders, overlords and winners from
outsiders, underdogs and losers.

* High-dimensional euclidean space

The most famous example is the biaxial Nolan Chart. Another is the
triaxial Pournelle Chart. A somewhat long-winded discussion of the
concept is found in the Wikipedia article “Political spectrum:”

* Chromatic factionalism

I first came across this on a European wiki (or tiki?) but have since
failed to “re-locate” it. This offers some flexibilities in that one
can mix and match factions, as in my own self identification with both
the red (egalitarian) and black (antiauthoritarian) factions. I have
proposed a “model agnostic” (though computationally intensive)
approach to factionalism in my blurt titled “Chromatic Content Coding”
at halfbakery.com:

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Chromatic_20Content_20Coding#1141759425

Halfbakery seems to have shuffled its namespace schema (or “dongling
schema” as I call them), so the above URL might not work as is.

* Percentage-based schemata

This is the preferred approach of many American special interest
groups (SIG’s). It consists of rating policymakers (at least
legislative branch policymakers) on a scale of 0-100%. The percentage
often represents simply the percentage of times a given politician
voted the same way a given SIG would, given a seat in the legislature.
Sometimes it is perhaps a weighted average. Not all SIG’s are
transparent about precisely which bills are included for “analysis.”
This approach to taxonomy can lead to absurdities such as David Brooks
(7 Jul 2006 “News Hour,” PBS) classifying Joe Lieberman as some kind
of überliberal thanks to a 0% rating by Christian Coalition.

Un anade cojo es un alimento muy completo.