Latest trend in audio engineering at WDTW

At least twice during Thom Hartmann's show today, the a few seconds of the theme music, if you will, of the Workers' Independent News (WIN) broadcasts were clearly audible at various points of the broadcast. If I were paranoid I'd say the traffic managers at Clear Channel station WDTW were deliberately allowing these snippets of the feed to leak onto the airwaves, for the express purpose of rubbing in the fact that the bu$iness model of for-profit radio requires overwriting WIN content with inanities like CNN Radio "News," the V-roll "news" stories of Marketwatch.com and of course the mini-infomercials with their voice-roll mannerisms.

Quotebag #36

“In a Grand Rapids Press interview Betsy DeVos said, ‘We just viewed this as a really powerful way to leverage creative talents for the benefit and enjoyment of all of us.’ Do we as artists want a future where we are looked at as primarily entrepreneurs? A world where creativity becomes something more valuable when it is thought of as good business? Do we want local [arts] organizations, locally funded, providing programming selected ultimately by local boards trained to look at the arts as a commodity to be ‘leveraged’?”—Richard Kooyman, quoted by Jeff Smith

“Idealistoj neniam maljuniĝos.”—Bonulo

“If you think believing man is innately good is as destructive as believing man is innately evil, then I really have nothing to add to that. That’s your opinion, but I don’t see how it’s tenable. At any rate, are you aware of the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy? That’s what you want to be looking for.”—François Tremblay

“It isn’t about intellectual property you disingenuous fuck, it’s about sticking to a historical and intellectual tradition that existed for near a goddamn century before Murray Rothbard came along and pissed all over the work of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker, et. al.”—Cory Moloney

“Corporate influence over the state extends far, far beyond the mere financing if campaigns. Energy corporations write our energy policy. Insurers write our health care laws. Paying for campy tv spots is such a minor aspect of the system. Campaign Finance Reform is just another distraction.”—matt

“See, how much happy the Ken and Dennis are working on a machine which has (IIRC, 1 MB of RAM) and look at todays kids (both 12 years olds and 35 years old idiots) how much they are in pain when they work on computers with 3.0 GHZ of CPU, 7200 RPM of HDD and 2 GB of RAM, while 10 times smaller than PDP-11. Reason: UNIX way (love) and Windows way (Idiotic).”—Arnuld Uttre

Another quotebag

“When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?’”—Don Marquis, quoted by Jack Saturday

“Remember kids, you can’t have crucifixion without fiction!”—CultOfDusty

“If we can’t make a dime on the street, will Big Brother leave us alone if we just putz putz around in our own backyard? Not so fast. In Michigan, House Bill 6458, introduced by two Democrats, Gabe Leland and Mike Huckleberry, will prohibit farming in any city with a population of 900,000 or more. Why didn’t they name Detroit outright, since it’s the only one that qualifies? And what’s going on here, exactly?”—Linh Dinh

“The state can never be replaced or transcended by private for-profit logics only, but only if civil society develops its own collective regulation mechanisms.”—Michel Bauwens

“A hobbyist and student of the economy, I’m no economist. I got a B.A. in Math in 1970, and promptly went to work in construction. A few years later New York City nearly went bankrupt. I couldn’t understand that. A year or two later the news reported that local farmers were plowing their crop into the soil, as it would cost them less than bringing the crop to market. That’s when I signed up for a semester of economics. About the first thing I noticed was that hardly any of the graphs in the textbook were based on actual numbers. So I started going through Statistical Abstracts at the library, gathering data, doing calculations (at first with a slide rule, later with a Radio Shack PC-1 Pocket Computer with 1K of memory!) and drawing graphs by hand. I’ve been into it ever since.”—Arthur Shipman

“When information management successfully over whelms the prospect for ...an ‘educated electorate,’ we’re playing solitaire with a deck where every card is a joker.”—Chad Hall

“Dark chocolate is one of my favorite snacks, but if you told me ‘you have no other choice, you must eat this dark chocolate’, I’d be unable to swallow it.”—Ettina

“The elephant in the room: The validity of currency has been separated from its... primary function; labor compensation utilized as a universal bartering tool for trade, goods and services. The religion of economics has subverted it into a measurement independent of its original blueprint.”—mary dohm

Bundles and other package deals

Big Phone and Big Cable know that about 1% of the people out there, like you and me, are in the bottom percentile among movie/TV viewers. For this segment, so much for their so-called Triple Play. The introduction of VoIP makes it so internet access is equivalent to home phone plus internet access. Now all Big Phone and Big Cable have to agree on is that there is to be no such thing as 'standalone broadband,' at least at a rate that is palatable. So VoIP is making it worse. Apple and Amazon purvey their iPad and Kindle wares which need wireless internet access and not much else, so there is another truckload of customers who wish there were such a thing as standalone mobile broadband. Maybe Apple and Amazon are making it worse.

Is mass emigration from America part of our future?

I've long been an advocate of replacing the word 'immigration' with 'migration' in popular discourse, and the blog entry US Emigration Rates... at Blended Purple illustrates one example of why; namely the ‘brain drain’ factor. Nobody thought Ireland would go from emigration central to immigration central. It’s hardly inconceivable that the United States can’t flip in the other direction.

The discussion of this subject also reminds me of Reagan’s trite slogan about ‘voting with one’s feet.’ This type of voting is of course not an equal opportunity franchise. Within the USA it’s pretty obvious that there's a middle class whose housing arrangements are a matter of at least some choice, and an underclass whose choice is made for them by economic constraints, and turns out to be the so-called ‘low rent district.’ It’s inevitable this pattern will globalize. Blended Purple is talking about “educated potential immigrants” who are “dropping the U.S[.] from their list…”

I wonder whether we may be looking at a future in which working class people are also looking at emigration, most plausibly to less developed countries, specifically those in which their particular occupational skills are still cheap enough to be competitive with capital. Most such countries, it seems, already have high unemployment rates, but the low-income ‘first world’ population may also be forced to emigrate to the ‘third world’ for an affordable cost of living. There might be more likelihood of a place for them there is it’s understood they’re to spend money. Seemingly for some time now the tacit understanding has been that the role of average Americans in the world economy is that of consumers. Maybe ‘offshoring’ these consumers has the potential to extend the potential of this particular form of running on the fumes of the postwar American economy, even beyond the credit bubble.

Another possible emigrant population is elderly people with long-term care needs. Long-term care is one of the few truly labor-intensive industries left, and is also one of the most staggeringly expensive ongoing financial burdens a typical American is likely to have to deal with. Already there is a ‘medical tourism’ industry, and already that industry is expanding from clearly elective services to such staples as major dental work. I wouldn't at all be surprised if nursing home patients at some point become medical tourists with one-way tickets.

It's no accident that the ‘free world’ consists of the top tier of countries in terms of GDP. Globalizing the already-apparent economic reality that mobility and habitational choice are determined by income and career potential, begs even harder the question of whether political freedom itself is an economic good, to be enjoyed by those who can afford it.

Unattainable pensions

Sometimes I wonder whether I should be using and promoting ClustrMaps, given that about 90% of their ad sponsorship is from far-right websites, but it's pretty useful for something free-as-in-beer.

The following ClustrMaps ad grabbed my attention:

Unsustainable Pensions Many government pensions are out of control. Learn more & take action! www.TheFreeEnterpriseNation.org

I couldn't help but think: Is the real problem unsustainable pensions or unattainable pensions? One side-effect of the pervasive trend toward two-tier payrolls is that the tier with the actually livable jobs, the jobs with bennies, is getting smaller and smaller, soon to be completely phased out, I'm sure. Americans, to their disgrace, have largely been cowed into submission. Instead of mobilizing against the fact that private sector workers are underpaid, they have successfully been conned into griping about 'overpaid' civil servants.

People transcend property and prices

The trouble with the idea of "free markets," including the idea of free markets, is that the market finds a price for everything, including people.

The trouble with the idea of "self ownership" is that it sets a precedent for the self as ownable. Particularly, if property rights include the right of transfer, and self ownership is the foundation on which property rights are built, the implications are staggering.

At the risk of being labeled a mystic, or worse, a religious person, I hold that personhood transcends commerce.

To quote (pdf) Republican State House candidate Marc Goodson:

What is the inherent value of a man? What should be the limit of public subsidy for each? According to Democrats, there is no limit, our inherent value is priceless. This belief is anti-social, inhumane, and unjust; we are not priceless.

The candor is certainly refreshing. It's always interesting when conservatism reveals its true colors. At least free market advocates, unlike "free market" advocates such as Goodson, understand that the path to a subsidy-free society must start by kicking away the supports at or near the top of the food chain, not the kick-em-when-they're-down variety of self-righteousness to which some are apparently addicted.

Comment on post at 'My Aspergers Child'

The following is my comment on Best and Worst Jobs for Aspergers Adults at My Asptergers Child. As has become habitual for me, it resulted in a

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It is of course debatable whether the incidence of Aspergers/autism is anywhere near 1:110, or whether the incidence is higher among current children than current adults, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it is true. In that case there will be 1% of the adult population plus their parents, let's say 3% of the adult population, plus an unknown number of allies and supporters, forming a voting bloc or whatever you want to call it, that will demand a more introvert-friendly labor market, which is to say, a world in which what you know is actually worth something; maybe even as much as who you know. Large numbers of the 'subclinical' element, say people suffering only 'social anxiety,' will also affiliate and identify with this growing movement. What should we demand? I propose the following:

What I think is needed is a return to a large or at least economically significant civil service, with provisions that the existence of job openings is part of the public record, signed applications and not resumes are used as documents of first contact, and interviews (i.e. introvert filters) are a late stage in the selection process, after application processing and competitive examinations. I’m not above advocating holding private sector human resources practices to similar standards. If that makes me a commie, so be it. I also advocate a database of public record for announcements of vacancies, public and private, or at least a proof-of-publication requirement when new employees are added to quarterly withholding tax returns. These reforms would still leave de facto employees who are de jure “independent contractors” as a loophole. Perhaps you can think of a policy strategy for de-gaming that aspect of it.

Writer’s block --> quotations with links

“Who would have thought that it would be easier to produce by toil and skill all the most necessary or desirable commodities than it is to find consumers for them?”—Winston Churchill, quoted by Jack Saturday

“When you vote for a centre-right candidate to keep a right-wing candidate from getting in, you help move the centre further to the right. And every time the centre moves rightward, so does the right wing. And progressive thought becomes ever more marginalized, and more people say the progressive candidate has no chance of winning, and so they vote centre-right, and on it goes.”—laura k

“Can you keep calling for Freedom and yet tolerate control of your credit and other economic rights by hidden and arbitrary credit ratings and credit scores? What Freedom do you have when you have to sign industry-wide fine print one-sided ‘contracts’ with your banks, insurance companies, car dealers, and credit card companies? Many of these contracts even block your Constitutional access to the courthouse.”—Ralph Nader

“Rick Michigan’s belief that picking winners and losers is wrong is the same thing as saying that we shouldn’t apply vision to our collective future. A visionless future isn’t a future of prosperity. It’s a future where things happen because of luck, and if you aren’t gaming luck then most of what you get will be bad.”—Eric B.

“It would be cool to see Jared graduate from high school next year, but you know what? It would be a lot cooler to see Christ come back in five minutes.”—Clay Brown, quoted by Jen

Fill-in-the-blank approach to sponsored links in search engines

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Still more writer’s block, so more quotations with links

“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

Putting it in 'park'

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.

More writer’s block, more quotations with links

“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

Comment on Winton Bates' blog entry Will the elderly poor fare better under pensions means tests?

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.

Yet another trend in broadcast advertising

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.

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Back again due to writer’s block, Quotations with links

“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