“If anything, perhaps one should support these web filters if it removes those who support IP maximalism from having access to a more enlightened community? ;-)”—Crosbie Fitch

“No one can argue that direct government creation of jobs would not actually create jobs while waiting for tax breaks to work is like waiting for Godot. ”—John Lawrence

“Not even dust to dust – Stardust to stardust, that’s how it is! Hi Luke!”—Monica

“Stringent equality, the crushing of indigenous elites and the socialization of the benefits rather than the costs ought to be a quid pro quo for open borders…. In the absence of these it should be seen as what it is…a scam to squeeze the poor.”—Parvulesco

“Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington’s political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class.”—Joe Bageant

It’s said by some that American politics is like a car: Use ‘D’ to go forward and ‘R’ to go backward. What then does ‘P’ stand for? I suggest: pragmatism.

“It’s only going to get worse. More and more we’re exporting our cognitive functions to software, forming a sort of rudimentary exocortex, and that pushes increasingly significant portions of one’s self into realms subject to IP controls. The logical endpoint of this seems to be a choice between forgoing a transhumanist future and uploading into locked-down hardware that applies DRM to your memories of experiencing copyright cultural products or of learning patented skills. Building robustly open technologies to allow it to remain possible to participate in modern culture without falling under the control of the IP industry seems imperative.”—Andrea Shepard

“Remember this about web services: if you’re not paying to use it, you’re the product being sold.”—Jeremiah

“Water officials in Queensland seem to have confused flunitrazepam with fluoride; this place is laid back like a banana lounge…”—Jason Ryan

“One requirement to be able to work in America is to have transportation, if you don’t own a car in most places with the exception of a few you are stuffed.”—Mark

“I’m not of the opinion that the libertarian spectrum can or does play out like a political buddy movie. There is common ground, and there are even areas where opinions from the left and right compliment one another. But the elephant in the room is the economy, stupid, at as a result there will always be antagonism.”—Phil Dickens

“Bisexuality implies a binary gender mod…el. I disagree with this fundamentally and believe that binary gender models are as outdated as the 3/5ths compromise.”—Anarchism

“A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ but you’re actually just extras in a remake of ‘Citizen Kane.’”—Paul Krugman, quoted by LVT Fan

Another blog comment gone wild. What can I say? Some topics really get me going—and going and… Again, second person (‘you’) pronouns reference Winton Bates, author of this.

The present essay strikes me primarily as calculated to score zingers on behalf of Public Choice Theory. The assumption taken as axiomatic here is that a voter is simply a specimen of Homo economicus in a ballot box, which can be used as an instrument of extraction from the ‘golden goose,’ by which I can only assume you mean that portion of the population actually worthy of dignity, or even existence.

Public Choice Theory, like any conservative school of thought, is predicated on reductionist assumptions about human nature. In this case it is assumed that voter behavior relative to public policy governing retirement finance, like all human decisions, are implicit in the voter’s individual self-interest. So, the main stakeholders are the older voters and to a lesser extent the middle aged. I suppose the assumption is that younger and prime-working-age voters are the actual golden geese and accordingly view retirement pensions as a burden on themselves. Please correct me if I’m misreading your editorial statement. While not stated explicitly, it’s not exactly subtle.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the population breaks down neatly into golden geese who create wealth and parasitic pensioners and other people on benefits, who only consume it. “As the number of retirees rises relative to numbers of people in the workforce, their interests are increasingly aligned with those of the community at large in maintaining incentives for the goose to continue laying golden eggs.” What you seem to be saying is that even low income retirees are smart enough to realize that being ‘entitled’ (right-wingers here in America absolutely love that word) to a slice of the pie is only worth something if the pie actually exists. Fair enough. If means testing shrinks the total outlay of the retirement program, it is more likely that the GDP will be sufficient to its funding.

My concerns about means testing are dramatized (perhaps overdramatized) in the made-for-TV movie Prairie Giant, about the life story of Tommy Douglas, preacher, activist, politician, Father of Medicare, and voted ‘greatest Canadian’ in a nationwide poll by the CBC. In one of the opening scenes in this film, the Rev. Douglas is present at a ‘means test,’ in which some elderly farm woman who as applied for aid is examined to see how many ribs are showing. While I understand the folly of getting one’s worldview from the movies/TV, it rather galvanized my position that ‘means tests are mean.’ Realistically, I think means tests need not be an affront to dignity if one gets the implementation right. It is best, I think, if the means test is simply an income test, with the income tax return the only document necessary for reporting income. This is the basis of America’s Earned Income Tax Credit, a crude approximation of a ‘negative income tax.’ A version of the EITC for seniors should probably allow some investment income to count as earned income for such purposes. Eligibility income should not be a cut-off, but a phase-out. Another policy mathematically equivalent to means testing Social Security benefits (or the equivalent in other countries) would be taxing a portion of benefits for high-income recipients. Of course, this idea has so far been soundly defeated by conservative interests in America, who have been remarkably successful in cultivating in their support base a reliable knee-jerk reaction against taxes, regardless of who is affected. While I don’t agree with this particular political tendency, I should point out that it doesn’t exactly fit the Public Choice Theory model of what a voter is and does.

The debate here in America on how to ‘save Social Security’ has largely become a matter of ‘pick your poison.’ It is widely accepted that the centerpiece of the program will be diminished expectations. The question is whether future retirees will take the hit in the form of higher payroll taxes (contributions to the plan), lower benefit levels or later retirement age. As indicated in the previous paragraph, taxes are always a non-starter in America’s mythic ‘rugged individual’-bound culture. Social Security benefits are already way below the poverty line. What is the point in a safety net program which does not provide safety? So, later retirement is the probable outcome. Happily, later retirement is more palatable to me than the other two options. I’m a career ‘late bloomer’ (to put it charitably) as it is. Knowing my luck, and at the rate I’m ‘going,’ I’ll probably run into some mandatory retirement age; very shortly after finally somehow advancing my pitiful introverted self, in this salesy boiler room called a market economy, to a position of actual responsibility, or professional esteem, or a job actually requiring intelligence; if not before. So, my cherished hope is that I actually have the opportunity to work long enough to actually accomplish something worthy of my underrecognized and underutilized talents, which in my case could be well into advanced age. So, I’m worried not just about whether Social Security will still be there when I’m old, but even more, whether there will be some actually-actionable recourse against age discrimination in the workplace.

Like most conservative and some progressive thinkers, you seem to think that the demographic crunch is the main threat to the future of retirement. I’m worried not so much whether the working-age population will be large enough to support me when I’m old, as whether the GDP will be sufficient. For the good of society, and the good of future generations, which is actually important to me, in spite of the implications of Public Choice Theory, my sincere hope is that future generations enter adulthood in a climate in which there are enough jobs to go around. If there is mass unemployment, the question of whether the worker-to-retiree ratio is sufficient becomes moot. It also doesn’t help if the lion’s share of the GDP is literally the lion’s share, concentrated at the top of the food chain as the returns on investment in automation accrue to capital, not labor. In such a future neither the young nor the old will flourish; only the wealthy.

The announcers are still using the exaggerated inflections and ‘voice roll’ cadences of a carnival barker, but now they are speaking in that stilted way very s-l-o-w-l-y. It’s a little reminiscent of ‘special English‘ broadcasts on Voice of America. In many cases it’s obvious that they are going for the senior market, as with the durable medical equipment firms whose business model is obviously built around Medicare (and just as obviously carries enough overhead to absolutely saturate the low-budget airwaves). It makes the commercial breaks seem ten times longer than they are, and one side effect has been that I have largely stopped listening to the radio.

“We must not kid ourselves. Social responsibility is inefficient in a global free market, and the market will not long abide those who do not avail of the opportunities to shed the inefficient. And we must be clear as to the meaning of efficiency. To the global economy, people are not only increasingly unnecessary, but they and their demands for a living wage are a major source of economic inefficiency. Global corporations are acting to purge themselves of this unwanted burden. We are creating a system that has fewer places for people.”—David Korten, quoted by Jack Saturday

“[Doug] Henwood is right—about the current trends concerning wages, profits, and the lack of change in elite opinion. But I do disagree with him about one thing: it’s not that the Left doesn’t have ideas about what to do. There are plenty of ideas, both criticisms of capitalism and suggestions for ways of creating noncapitalism. What the Left hasn’t been able to achieve in the United States is a form of organization either inside the Democratic Party or outside, in order to make its ideas known and to inspire others to participate in creating a different common sense in this country. It’s one of the key differences between the current crises and the 1930s.”—David Ruccio

“Anyone concerned with social justice should grasp the implausibility of tycoons like Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and Ray Kurzweil undermining the very hierarchies they benefit from. If radical and progressive Singularitarians want a future that’s not controlled by money and guns for the pleasure of the bosses, we’re going to have to struggle.”—Summerspeaker

“By the time I got to the end of this essay, the videos were done, and still, nobody had said word one about this simple fact: almost the only form of political activity that has mattered since the 1960s is the running of 15-second broadcast television political campaign advertisements, and those are (a) prohibitively expensive and (b) to some extent, auctioned.”—Brad Hicks

“I think a lot of you are missing the point about rental contracts’ slavery-like provisions. Sure, they’re unenforceable, and sure, you can get them thrown out. But how many people actually know this and are capable of getting this to happen? Most likely, they’ll just assume they have to abide by the terms, and the case never makes it to court. It’s still a problem that people are putting language into contracts, knowing it can’t be enforced, so they can take advantage of the weak. If you don’t see that as a problem, I don’t know what to tell you. Contracts should mean what they say.’—Silas Barta

This is yet another case of comment-blogorrhea, in this case in reply to this. Any second person pronouns in the text below are references to Poor Richard.

====8<---------------- I don’t necessarily agree with your contention that the myriad species of utility in your taxonomy of utilities can or should be rolled into one framework of general utility. I don’t necessarily disagree with the contention, either. Like Mr. Anderson, I’m ‘agnostic,’ preferring to wait and see what the data say. Pubwan, of course is my proposed methodology for gathering the (hopefully) relevant data. Like any human, I have an idea of what I’d like the data to prove, and it seems not to coincide with your framework of general utility. More specifically, I question the assumption held by economists at least since Walras that utility is a scalar quantity, conveniently measurable in units of currency. One reason I want to believe either that utility is BS or else that utility is vector-valued or irreducible or otherwise non-scalar is because I’ve taken a liking to various ecological and other groups and causes that are questioning the legitimacy of GDP as a measure of quality of life, or even of economic development. As someone whose career never really took off, I also have a personal vested interest in the idea that ‘money isn’t everything.’ My take on the notion of vector-valued utility is here. I had a little trouble finding it as I misremembered now that I had worded it “quality of life as vector-valued function.” This little bit of serendipity led me to the discovery that Google Blog Search knows of exactly one instance of the phrase “vector valued utility” in the blogosphere. (Discussion of your discussion on Google later, BTW) For your amusement, here’s what’s been said about vector-valued utility. I think the concept of vector-valued utility (or at least vector-valued income) underlies the notion of ‘multiple bottom line’ accounting that has been applied to various types of politically-correct businesses. I seriously doubt this practice is sufficient for capitalism to buy its soul back, but I highly value the empirical opportunities that this practice should open up, if combined with the introduction of radical transparency to accounting.

Now for Google guy Chris Anderson and his data deluge. I’ll read the pdf later (really). Right now I’m commenting on your comments on it.

“At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics.”

That’s called factor analysis, and statisticians have been talking about it since before I was born. Yawn. I do agree with Mr. Norvig that the point is that data are available (to some) with unprecedented fidelity. That is exactly the point. Using Google again to trace my own activity log (another example of the pervasiveness of cloud computing) I retrieve the quote “plotting high-resolution demand curves” from pubwan wiki, and in the process discover exactly one other page containing (at the time of indexing, anyway) the word “pubwan” and the phrase “high resolution”. Needless to say, I’ve been aware for some time that ‘pubwan’ is a word in the Thai language. I never got a round tuit and decided to satisfy that curiosity. Unfortunately, Google Translate doesn’t yet include Google Transliterate, at least for Thai->English. The other page about pubwan and high resolution contained a Facebook link so I inquired there. The person on the other end might think I’m an idiot, or an example of why Americans are dumb, but maybe not, and I’m overcome with curiosity. Aaaaanyhoooo, combined with the emerging instrumented ecosystem, etc., yes, it is both technically exciting (for the few) and politically chilling (for the many). Interesting you should mention dupermarkets, BTW. Did you get that one from me? 🙂 More or less, I would say that I would like to see as much of these data make it into the public domain. As far as privacy, transparency and democratic regulation, well, as a nominal anarchist sympathizer, I’m supposed to believe in neither democracy nor regulation. At any rate, I think they are both irrelevant to the issue of symmetric transparency. Otherwise, I would say yes to transparency and no to privacy. Privacy no, not because I don’t believe in it in the normative sense, but because I don’t believe in it in the positive sense, and transparency YES, because the cause of transparency (but only if it’s symmetric transparency) has become the one cause to which I am most fervently committed. Informationally, I’m a militant communist.

ONE MORE THING: You are eminently qualified to edit pubwan wiki. Everyone is eligible to edit pubwan wiki. That is the whole point. It runs on Media Wiki, so in theory it’s impervious to both vandalism and incompetence, neither of which apply to you, anyway. The thing is absolutely dying on the vine as a one-person wiki; which is one thing that is not meant to be.

“Taxes and regulations should be eliminated from the bottom up and subsidies and welfare should be eliminated from the top down.”—Kevin Carson

“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.”—Steve Bieda

“Confusion to Big Sib! Clarity to little sib!”—Necrodata Thanatos

“…for many people, defenses of individual autonomy and deep suspicions of authoritarian concentrations of power will be complemented by equally foundational defenses of a need for fairness…”—Dale Carrico

“Idealists consider the revolution successful only if the ideals are adopted by 100% of the people. On the other hand, pragmatists consider themselves successful if they are able to rule with 100% of the power.”—Jeremy Weiland

“It’s a devil’s bargain. While in a vacuum, winning greater rights and acceptance for the queer community is obviously desirable, such gains can serve to bolster other systems of oppression. I demand liberation for all of us, not just respectable white gay men. Instead of trying to do better under the current rules of hierarchy and competition, we need to move to a new game where nobody loses.”—Summerspeaker

“If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, pragmatism is the first refuge of the scoundrel. Bakunin always shines a critical light on the compromisers and those who insist that we have to settle for less.”—Anarcho

“The gift of $100, though not much – is in fact something. Whereas, in today’s money-based economies, being alive is not a guarantee of economic access – hence the greater value of the $100.”—Rebecca Burlingame

“The reality is Lake Wobegon in reverse. About 80% of us are below average. Not you or I perhaps. But then again, I read somewhere that 19% of us consider ourselves to be in the top 1%, and many more think we have a real shot at being there. And so we toe the line, and tow it, I suppose.”—Wyn, a.k.a. LVT Fan

“Firstly, to identify as market anarchist places undue emphasis on the economic aspects of life at the expense of broader social concerns. I want a market economy (at least partially), but I do not want a market society. Secondly, why should we emphasize market production at the expense of, say, household or peer production? Are these not equally as important and liberating? Thirdly, the term ‘market’ should not be used loosely to mean all voluntary actions.”—Ernst York Gander

This one calls itself Public Notice. So far, Source Watch has nothing to say about them (or maybe I just don’t know how to navigate Source Watch). Their rhetorical spin could perhaps be called piig-baiting, but I call it civil-servant-bashing.