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Quotebag #113
ackhuman: We know by now that hard work at poverty wages is not how those with good work ethic develop skills and experience to become wealthy capitalists. On the contrary, huge numbers of people working at poverty wages is how those willing to exploit the desperation of others become wealthy capitalists. Michael O. Church: We…
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Education and its disruptors
Some say debt aversion is a bad thing. Maybe it is, “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and all. I was born in the mid-1960s, but my parents were late bloomers, reproduction-wise, so I’m a demographic oddity for my age in being only one generation removed from the Great Depression. My parents were also low-achieving enough that…
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More on “right to work” and issue framing
Framing is of course important, but I cringe just a little when people use the free rider framing against “right to work” because free rider problems and “tragedy of the commons” arguments in general seem to find uses most often in cases for right of center causes. Same for appeals to contractually defined rights. I…
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Open source managers for my recipe collection, maybe yours too?
My dream recipe database would link to USDA’s National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference by using that database’s NDB_NO field as the primary key for recipe ingredents. This would allow rapid calculation of at least approximate macronutrient profiles of each prepared recipe. As an added bonus, I’d like to create a table that maps barcodes…
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Is there #OpenData outside #OpenGov?
Is there a public domain separate from the public sector? Is there any interest in applying pressure to the private sector for increased transparency and a less proprietary approach to data? I ask this because when I check in on #OpenData as a Twitter hashtag, approximately 100% of the tweets describe some kind of activity…
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Comment rescued from original article deletion, about Google’s version of patent hoarding
Hmm, seems the progress.org article to which I referred here has been deleted. To add to the misery this happened before the Wayback Machine got ahold of it. As luck would have it, Disqus retained my comment. Perhaps Disqus isn’t as horrible as I thought. Certainly my opinion of them went up 10 points today.…
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Are you nescient?
Nescient, in case you didn’t know, is the opposite of “omniscient.” While I hate the whole “thought leader” fad, I’m finding that my favorite ally among public intellectuals is Frank Pasquale, someone who seems to actually “get it” when it comes to what issues I think are actually important concerning the big data fad, and…
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Google, the patent non-troll
Scott Santens, a.k.a. 2noame, of UBI (unconditional basic income) movement fame, has clued me in on a website called progress.org. Their agenda seems to be a synthesis of Georgism and Aust(e)rianism, and their recruiting strategy seems to be baiting progressives with a domain name like “progress.org” and switching them with the “it’s really corporatism you’re…
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Confession
I sincerely hope the 21st century turns out to be as humiliating for supporters of free (and “freed”) market ideology as the 20th was for supporters of egalitarianism. If this makes me a bad person, oh well.
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Thesis
Thesis: There are abuses of humans that arise from economic phenomena, that do not have their root in the political process. Identifiable groups that are attacking that thesis: Conservatives, neoliberals, classical liberals, laissez-faire capitalists, anarcho-capitalists and “left” libertarians. Questions: Any questions?