I don’t think it’s any coincidence that “executive” and “executioner” have a root word in common. As no good deed goes unpunished, conversely, there are lucrative rewards for many antisocial acts. There’s a certain school of thought that emerges in a whole range of discussion topics, such as the question of whether one CEO is as valuable to an organization (including, increasingly, nominally nonprofit organizations) as thousands of front line workers, or the question of whether the role played by venture capitalists is actually useful to society, or especially, the bringing in of executive types dubbed “emergency managers” and the like, charged with privatizing, de-unionizing, de-pensionizing, two-tiering, or otherwise humbling the economic expectations and breaking the sense of self-worth of people involved in the provision of public services. “Someone has to make the difficult/unpopular decisions,” say the Very Serious People, as if unpopularity (more precisely, antipopulism) is the very definition of leadership.
Category: Uncategorized
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Deleted “No More Sunsets” from blogroll
Seems the blogspot address of that blog has been taken over by a spamblog. A similar thing happened to “Polycentric Order.”
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Quotebag #102
“That’s why I’m concerned over the irony of the net generation, which has spawned a number of anti-Wall-Street movements and sentiments, to see people in this generation intuitively picking up trading practices that carry on every bit of foul legacy that offline traders have practiced before the net generation. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.”—Rick Falkvinge
“The invisible hand, in markets or in cultures, is way overblown. Its more of an invisible pinky finger.”—Poor Richard
“Productivity is the Achilles heel of capitalism because it forces ever more destructive competition; enrichment of the ‘winners’ and impoverishment of the ‘losers.’ Productivity does not lift all boats.”—susan the other
“One can also imagine ‘Marketplaces’ for public education, police protection, etc. The possibilities — and the rents — are limitless!”—Lambert Strether
“Just because they do not do so in the contemporary fashion of entrepreneurs it does not mean they are stuck in their ways or useless.”—Gianpiero Petriglieri
“the prevalence of financial services firms in the U.S. has an adverse effect on youngsters, offering a ‘gateway drug’ into more pernicious pathological states of materialism, obsessive greed, financial status anxiety and moral degeneration, which in turn can lead to criminal behavior and outright pathological pyschosis.”—craazyman
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It had to happen
Not that I’m complaining. Just observing. -
Quotebag #101
“Just keep in mind that, as an individual, you won’t know what they really think they know about you, but as a corporation you can buy complete information about anyone who hasn’t opted out.”—Cathy O’Neil
“Anarcho-capitalism is like running an MMORPG, finding a game-breaking exploit, and being all ‘Well nobody would do that to all the other players because nonaggression principle.’ And then not fixing the bug.”—Zacqary Adam Green
“During the time discussed, the government’s crusade against PGP suddenly stopped. Why? At the time, it was widely assumed that a crack had been found, and it sounds like there is evidence one way or another backing this article.”—John
“Regarding Taskrabbit? To riff on Hanns Johst: ‘Whenever I see the word “outsourcing,” I reach for my Browning.’ Outsourcing is anything but progressive, as a word.”—SocraticGadfly
“So, the sharing economy is a temp agency crossed with a Zynga game. Wonderful.”—Zacqary Adam Green
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“U SIGH”
This acronym comes to us courtesy of Antoine Williams, an aspiring criminologist educated at Carleton University, who appeared on The Agenda with Steve Paikin in the first installment of the “Dude, where’s my future?” series. It describes social interactions between the marginally employed (precarious) and the gainfully employed (Antoine’s term: “stable,” meaning full time permanently employed, and not having experienced sudden job loss). The letters in the acronym are intended as follows:
- U
- Understanding—The stable person doesn’t understand that the labor market is in a state of crisis.
- S
- Suggestions—The stable person suggests all the courses of action that the precarious person has already tried. Williams didn’t bring up transactional analysis terminology, but I would say this is the opening gambit of a game of “why don’t you—yes, but”
- I
- Ignorance—Stable people are ignorant of the issues facing precarious people.
- G
- Gaffe-ing—After a certain number of rounds of this game, the precarious person commits gaffes, or faux pas, or “lose their cool.”
- H
- Hibernation, Hiding and becoming a Hermit—Social isolation sets in.
The entire process just makes you sigh…
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Quotebag #100
“The sharing economy is not an alternative to capitalism, it’s the ultimate end point of capitalism in which we are all reduced to temporary labourers and expected to smile about it because we are interested in the experience not the money. Jobs become ‘extra money’ just like women’s jobs used to be ‘extra money’, and like those jobs they don’t come with things like insurance protection, job security, benefits — none of that old economy stuff. But hey, you’re not an employee, you’re a micro-entrepreneur. And you’re not doing it for the money, you’re doing it for the experience. We just assume you’re making a living some other way.”—Tom Slee
“Things that require a network effect, after they get it, are in a super leveraged position that they can cash in.”—octaveguin
“We should consider it a point of pride that we are no longer all forced to live under the permanent supervision of our families. That the current Great Recession has made independence unobtainable for many of the current generation should be regarded with horror by anyone concerned with feminism and individual freedom, and yet another reason to demand immediate economic justice.”—Alice Raizel
“And to the extent that those power imbalances are an inevitable result of free competition iterated over generations from moderately unequal beginnings, there can be no freedom under an ideology of absolute freedom. Freedom must be tempered with active rebalancing of economic and political power, in order to preserve enough equality for any freedom to exist at all.”—Tiercelet -
Crowdsourcing paranoia
Gaius Publius has posted at America Blog asking readers to share their most imaginative speculations as to what might be inside the black box that Gaius refers to as “data trafficking” (and Julian Assange refers to as “data laundering”). Being a speculator is of course not the same thing as being a conspiracy theorist. I hope the comment thread there will be long (both in number of comments and time-span), and intelligent, and demonstrable-in-principle. An expository statement on what inferences are possible given what data inputs. On what business models can be built around what information asymmetries. On what the implications are of the particular combinations of data collections known to be available to the US government, and to other entities.
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Quotebag #99
“Students of economics learn that the formal usage of the concepts ‘inefficiency’, ‘deadweight loss’, and ‘distortion’ in normative public finance refer to a theoretical setting where a private economy is in competitive equilibrium and a government can use lump-sum taxes to modify the endowments of individuals.”—Yves Smith
“I know, for instance, that sales suck dick something fierce. Which is why I’m not looking for employment in sales.”—Clarissa
“Ultimately, today’s World Wide Web happened by accident, and the pessimist in me wonders if a democratising platform for human communication can only be created that way.”—Kevin Yank
“until we can shift the ‘if it’s not making money it’s not worth doing’ on/off button, we’re fucked,, all of us and I’m not talking about you, in the here and now (which is but the symptom) but all the way up and into the very value systems that ‘runs’ us”—Irma Wilson (fb)
“When the dispute over the Means Test was in progress there was a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive. So far as I remember, one school of dietitians worked it out at five and ninepence, while another school, more generous, put it at five and ninepence halfpenny. After this there were letters to the papers from a number of people who claimed to be feeding themselves on four shillings a week.”—George Orwell