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Is Value Network relevant to Angel Economics?
I suspect the architects of Value Network (“ERP for networks”) have stumbled into some of the same concepts that I did when expanding on Angel Economics: My first suggestion was to start with a simple production process; organized around one person or some other small number. Identify the inputs and outputs of that process. This…
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What is a “foundup?”
I saw this mandala-like Venn diagram on Facebook: The Venn Diagram partitions the plane into 14 regions. There are of course 16 possible subsets of the four elements. The two are excluded from the diagram (but hopefully not excluded as possibilities) are You are great at it The world needs it You don’t love it…
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Moving the goalposts is not a victimless crime
As we contemplate the slow, painful, but hopefully forward progress from the merely voluntary to the snarkily-defended “euvoluntary,” to the thickly voluntary, to the actually palatable, let’s re-visit a concept introduced by the labor movement: the scab. The scab is someone who crosses a picket line. By doing so, they make things worse for everyone…
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Quotebag #112
There is no article of faith more fancifully supernatural than belief in a natural free market. Dale Carrico Because when people are living on the bleeding edge, at the absolute lowest cost of existence in this society, then occasionally things are going to go wrong and the person is going to run out of money.…
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Police is a verb
Privatizing the police does not constitute abolishing the police. Anarchy refers to an unpoliced population, not a privately policed one. If anything, the accountability-in-theory of a local police department to the community at large is a lesser evil (though still of course an evil) than the accountability-in-practice of a security firm to its paying customers.…
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Nonproprietary cities
Not sure if it’s a trend, but I’ve recently noticed what seems to be a shift in terminology from “charter cities” to “proprietary cities.” I’m also not sure whether these terms are supposed to be synonymous. Nevertheless, it seems that a charter city or a proprietary city is an attempt at an end run around…
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Quotebag #111
TheLateThagSimmons: It’s funny how quickly the opposition will hide behind automation being a threat to replace low-end wage labor in relation to minimum wage laws, but then suddenly when we offer a different idea, they need those workers and the workers need their bosses. quoderat: One of the main reason “cloud” everything is being pushed…
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Is earning an absolute prerequisite to giving?
I revisited a post at my other blog from a little more than a year ago. I also re-visited the Google Blogs search it’s based on, and I’m happy to report that Google Blog Search isn’t quite dead yet. I’m also pleased to find that the search (which I hadn’t visited for a few months)…
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Quotebag 110
Every society in human history has been a meritocracy, with “merit” and “achievement” defined in terms of how well one serves the interests of the structure of power. Kevin Carson The only people who can afford to be apolitical or “above the fray”, after all, are the solid political winners. But until one is in…
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Which is a more potent accountability mechanism? Competition or transparency?
I would say transparency, by orders of magnitude. The two are of course not mutually exclusive. I wouldn’t be surprised if competition advocates such as left-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists would like me to believe that competition is a prerequisite for transparency. If so, I’m not buying it. If anything, competitive markets are far more contingent on…