As is the trend in the ISP industry, the price of bandwidth is going up, so nickel and dime tactics become a more central feature of business models everywhere. In Virgin Mobile's case it takes the form of a "speed cap." I expect customers' threats to go elsewhere are little more than face-saving bluff, and most will eat the de-facto price increase. Demand for bandwidth, it seems, is like a gas, in that it automagically fills whatever space of whatever shape. In that regard it is like autosprawl—no amount of road-building will bring the end of traffic jams.
The empirical question is, is this the result of exogenous market forces such as an unavoidable traffic jam, or a structural increase in the price of bandwidth, or is it a case of operators milking the business model more aggressively? Is it still the case that one's ISP dollar goes significantly farther practically everywhere outside the United States? Is it still the case that the non-US market features much more competition in prepaid services, and much more willingness on the part of network operators to work with 'unlocked' mobile devices? Having never had much opportunity to travel, I have to take other people's word on such matters.
Is there some Iron Law of Economics to the effect that prepaid services are more expensive or otherwise less of a value for the money than postpaid? If there's any truth to the Time Value of Money, than logically, the opposite should be true! Since the market for postpaid services consists pretty much by definition of people with steady-eddie enough income and cash flow to commit to at least a two-year hitch (what my mom calls 'established' people), the prepaid market can justifiably be thought of as in some respects a captive audience. Does the difference in value between prepaid and postpaid offerings reflect anything beyond 'because they can?' Hopefully inquiring minds will somehow devise an empirical study of these market behaviors.
And on a tangentially related note, what's this cock and bull story the Social Security Administration is telling our elders about the non-inflationary times in which we're supposedly living?
Here's the email from Virgin Mobile, just to give you the reader a taste of the tone:
Hey Lorraine,
Here at Virgin Mobile, our mission is to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Sometimes that means making difficult choices in order to provide the best possible service to the greatest number of customers.
To make sure we can keep offering our $40 Unlimited Broadband2Go Plan at such a great price, we're putting a speed limit in place for anyone on that plan who uses over 5GB in a month.
How will it work? Starting February 15, 2011, if you go over 5GB in a month on the $40 Unlimited Plan:
* Your data speeds will be limited for the remainder of the monthly plan cycle. During this time, you may experience slower page loads and file downloads and lags in streaming media. * Your data speeds will return to normal as soon as you buy a new Broadband2Go Plan. * This change will only affect plans bought on or after 2/15/2011.
How will it affect me? Keep in mind, 5GB is A LOT of data. To give you an idea, it's about 250 hours of web browsing or over 500,000(!) emails*. So this change shouldn't affect you unless you're a heavy downloader/streamer/etc.
How will I know if I'm getting close to 5GB? We've updated the progress bar in your Connection Manager to show the amount of data you've used. If you go above 5GB in a month, the bar will turn yellow, letting you know your data speeds will be reduced until you buy a new plan.
By putting this speed limit in place, we're making sure we can deliver the same quality service you've come to expect from Broadband2Go. We hope you understand.
Thanks for being a Broadband2Go customer. Virgin Mobile
* Data usage per activity is based on an average. Actual usage varies depending on the types of websites, video, email and other internet applications accessed.
The McCarthy era saw the institutionalization of a lot of 'civic religion,' such as addition of 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance, and 'In God We Trust' to the currency, and the inevitably sectarian 'National Day of Prayer.'
The present pattern of secular-bashing will perhaps dissipate if/when the public (both religious and not) comes to see gratuitous God-talk in political speeches for what it is; namely delineation of in-groups and out-groups.
“Vernor [Vinge] is too smart to blog. He writes books! ”—David Brin
“I am aware of the counterargument, which is that government needs to do some things in secrecy because doing all of its business in public makes it impossible to get those things done. True, however, if the price of ‘empire’ is that we accept that and stop trying to find out what our government is doing in our name, then I’m not certain that ‘empire’ is anything remotely what the Founders had in mind and I’m certain it’s not what I want.”—Eric B.
“Partisanship is something I get. And when you ask for too little, as is always done, you end up compromising more than you bargained for.”—Dyssonance
“When resistance has a logo, you can be sure it isn’t resistance but capture.”—Dale Carrico
“I’m not a misanthrope: I like people; but in small doses.”—chaotic idealism
“Unfortunately it seems that the Wild West of the Internet is being tamed by the Railroad of commerce, with its twin rails of paywalls and data mining from social networks. Net filtering is the sleepers…ow my analogy hurts”—Ben Callinan
This post is the outcome of an impromptu decision to do some online coursework. The assignment is the final project for Dale Carrico's course Thinking What We Are Doing. The reading list for the course is here. The instructions for this assignment are here.
constraints
restraints
tactics
25. commons
The public, and the need to deal with it.
But whatever the mix, and whichever factor was most significant, the consequence of this strategy was to leave open the field for innovation in telecommunications. AT&T did not control how its wires would be used, because the government restricted that control. By restricting that control, the government in effect created a commons on AT&T’s wires. (Lessig, 2001, p. 45)
I am not as optimistic about the present or the future of Cyberspace as a free and democratic space as is Barlow. We, the homesteaders here in Cyberspace, are at the mercy of the code, at the mercy of the hardware and software, at the mercy of the sys admins and wizards. Economic factors around the world affect our ability to access information; race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and all of the other factors that often interefere with f2f communication also interfere with cyber-communication. (Walker, in reply to Barlow)
51. elite
The de facto powerful. Not to be confused with the so-called intellectual elite.
If the technologically advanced countries can secure property rights over resources that only advanced technology will reach, goes the argument, then patent rights over the genome are a kind of second colonial expansion. (Boyle, …Genome…, p. 5)
Data-entry workers, shop clerks, and the warehouse staff at amazon.com will face the same problems as ever: depressed wages, battles over benefits, barriers to unionization, and inadequate political representation in a Congress whose resemblance to the House of Lords is for them a matter of economic class more than of anachronism. Their situations will be the less stable for the “creative destruction” of firms and industries that Kelly celebrates. Tribalism will do them little good, as is generally true of lesser tribes. (Purdy)
104. publication
Publish or perish.
One wonders what Macaulay would have thought about the attempt by Margaret Mitchell’s estate to prevent the publication of The Wind Done Gone. (Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain, p. 56)
105. public good
The public is good.
The maximalists favor expansive intellectual property rights. They tend to view exemptions and privileges on the part of users or future creators as a tax on rights holders and have sympathy for thinly disguised ‘sweat of the brow’ claims. They exhibit a kind of economic bipolar disorder: being deeply pessimistic about market functioning around potential public goods problems in the absence of intellectual property rights, and yet strikingly, even manically, optimistic about our ability to avoid transaction costs and strategic behavior “anti-commons effects” that might be caused by the presence of intellectual property rights. (Boyle, …Genome…, p. 9)
112. rivalrousness
Sometimes life really is a zero-sum game.
In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. (Barlow)
124. spontaneous order
Spontaneity gives way to order.
Wiener works up to the fantasy by pointing out that there are many organizations whose parts are themselves small organizations. Hobbes’s Leviathan is a Man-State made up of men; a Portuguese man-of-war is made up of polyps that mirror it in miniature; a man is an organism made of cells that in some respects also function like organisms. This line of thought leads him to ask how these “bodies politic” function. “Obviously, the secret is in the intercommunication of its members” (p. 156 [Cybernetics]). The flow of information is thus introduced as a principle explaining how organization occurs across multiple hierarchical levels. To illustrate, he instances the “sexually attractive substances” that various species secrete to insure that the sexes will be brought together (p. 156). For example, the pheromones that guide insect reproduction are general and omnidirectional, acting in this respect like hormones secreted within the body. The analogy suggests that external hormones organize internal hormones, so that a human organism becomes, in effect, a sort of permeable membrane through which hormonal information flows. At this point we encounter his first demurral. “I do not care to pronounce an opinion on this matter,” he announces rather pretentiously after introducing it, preferring to “leave it as an interesting idea” (p. 157). (Hayles)
125. stakeholder
The principal.
A reformed state that operates within a context of multistakeholdership and which is no longer subsumed to corporate interests, but act as a fair arbiter between the Commons, the market and the gift economy. (Bauwens)
131. "Tragedy of the Commons"
Yet another exercise in fundamentalist apologetics.
It is worth noting, however, that while earlier scholarship extolled enclosure’s beneficial effects, some more recent empirical work has indicated that it had few, if any, effects in increasing agricultural production. The tragedies predicted in articles such as Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons did not occur. In fact, the commons frequently may have been well-run, though the restraints on its depletion and the incentives for investment in it may have been “softer” than the hard-edged norms of private property. (Boyle, …Enclosure…, p. 36)
3. access
Rightsestrictions management.
One of the most salient lessons from the copyright wars of the last few years is that if express permission is required before one can post a collection of anything on the Internet, one will be unable to do it. (Litman, p. 14)
How about an intellectual property ombudsman to represent the interests of the public and the public domain? (Boyle, …Genome…, p. 18)
5. agency
Dignity
We must…take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the light has turned green. (Lanier, 2010)
31. control
Kill the controls!
For much of the twentieth century, it was essentially illegal even to experiment with the telephone system. It was a crime to attach a device to the telephone system that AT&T didn’t build or expressly authorize. (Lessig, 2001, p. 30)
32. copyright
Copyright means copy is not a right.
For example, Lindberg and Patterson’s book The Nature of Copyright reverses the polarity from the normal depiction, and portrays copyright as a law of users’ rights. The public domain is the figure and copyright the ground. The various privileges and defenses are not exceptions, they are at the heart of copyright, correctly understood. Copyright is, in fact, a system designed to feed the public domain providing temporary and narrowly limited rights, themselves subject to considerable restrictions even during their existence—all with the ultimate goal of promoting free access. (Boyle, …Enclosure…, p. 60)
59. fair use
That which is not permitted is forbidden. That which is not forbidden is permitted.
Thirty years ago, when you saw something you wanted to use or share, the default rule was that you were entitled to do so. (Litman, p. 15)
89. panopticon
An authority figure wearing mirror shades.
Once a new intellectual property right has been created over some informational good, the only way to ensure efficient allocation of that good is to give the rights holder still greater control over the user or consumer in the aftermarket so as to allow for price discrimination, since the only efficient monopoly is a monopoly with perfect price discrimination. Yet, to achieve perfect price discrimination with digital intellectual property goods, whose marginal cost is zero, the rights holders will argue that they need even more changes of the rules in their favor: relaxed privacy standards so they can know more about our price points; enforceable shrink-wrap or clickwrap contracts of adhesion so that we can be held to the terms of our particular license, no matter how restrictive; and changes in antitrust rules to allow for a variety of practices that are currently illegal, such as resale price maintenance and various forms of tying. Rights holders will also claim that they need technical changes with legal backing, such as the creation of personalized digital objects surrounded by state-backed digital fences, objects that are tied to particular users and particular computers, so that reading my e-book on your machine is either technically impossible, a crime, or a tort—or possibly all three. (Boyle, …Enclosure…, p. 50)
97. privacy
Privacy is a technological impossibility. Get over it.
We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do. (Hughes)
114. secrecy
Secrecy is to privacy as institution is to individual.
The political power, however, clearly belongs to the pharmaceutical industry, which actually tried to eliminate “notice and comment” requirements for exclusive drug licenses in 1999. Current law allows the public to obtain basic financial information about a drug's development and sale, such as royalty rates paid on licenses, subsequent development costs, sales figures, and so forth. The government must disclose such information and allow the public to object to the approval of a company's license. Fortunately, the industry's attempt to throw a veil of secrecy over the granting of exclusive drug licenses failed—a small victory against the modern enclosure movement. (Bollier)
1. abundance
Abundance is a prerequisite for dignity.
At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. “‘Free’ as in ‘free speech,’” Richard Stallman says, not “‘free’ as in ‘free beer.’” But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and low cost or no cost. When the marginal cost of production is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn’t charge—well, the world looks a little different. This is at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice. Yet that is what we are doing. (Boyle, …Enclosure…, p. 48)
6. amateur
The luxury of not being in it for the money.
The most powerful engine driving this information space turns out not to be money — at least if we’re focusing on generating and disseminating the content rather than constructing the hardware that it moves through. (Litman, p. 8)
18. broadcast
Shevek's broadcast of transilience theory in The Dispossessed, or John Galt's radio address in Atlas Shrugged.
Broadcast spectrum was originally so plentiful that the government granted radio licenses to anyone upon request. But by the 1920s, the proliferation of broadcasters was producing signal interference, which prompted a debate about how to allocate control of the electromagnetic spectrum. (Bollier)
23. code
Dog whistle. Also program code and genetic code.
The code of cyberspace—its architecture and the software and hardware that implement that architecture—regulates life in cyberspace generally. Its code is its law. Or, in the words of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cofounder Mitch Kapor, “Architecture is politics.” (Lessig, 2001, p. 35)
24. collaboration
The privilege of collegiality.
The interesting questions are how far the power of the creator to publish their own work is going to go, how much those changes will be mirrored in group work, and how much better collaborative filters will become in locating freely offered material. (Shirky, 2003)
36. crowdsourcing
Collaboration minus privilege.
What we used to class as trivia (and therefore useless information) becomes a matchless resource when it is combined with other trivia in searchable form (Litman, p. 6)
40. cybernetics
The science of automata.
In March 2002, Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University, had his neuronal system directly linked to a computer network. He thus became the first human being to whom data could be fed directly, bypassing the five senses. (Žižek)
42. cyberspace
The domain of automata.
Cyberspace seems to be the consensual hallucination of too much complexity, too much articulation. It is the virtual reality of paranoia, a well-populated region in the last quarter of the Second Christian Millenium. (Haraway)
53. end-to-end principle (e2e)
What goes around comes around.
In the laboratory the behaviorist approach leads to “black box” engineering, in which one assumes that the organism is a “black box” whose contents are unknown. Producing equivalent behavior then counts as producing an equivalent system. (Hayles)
68. gift economy
An oxymoron.
These are communities of shared values in which participants freely contribute time, energy, or property and over time receive benefits from membership in the community. (Bollier)
69. information
Does not want to be free. Must be forcibly liberated.
Recall that Gregory Bateson defined information as a difference that makes a difference; if there is no difference, there is no information. Since entropy tends always to increase, it will eventually result in a universe where all distributions are in their most probable state and universal homogeneity prevails. Imagine Dr. Zhivago sitting at his desk in a cold, cold room, trying to telegraph a message to his beloved Laura, while in the background Laura’s theme plays and entropy keeps relentlessly increasing. Icicles hanging from his fingers and the telegraph key, he tries to tap out “I love you,” but he is having trouble. Not only is he freezing from heat death; he is also stymied by information death. No matter what he taps, the messages always come out the same: eeeeeee (or whatever letter is most common in the Russian alphabet). This whimsical scenario illustrates why Wiener associated entropy with oppression, rigidity, and death. (Hayles)
73. mapping
The art of figuring out what the hell is really going on.
A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear. (Haraway)
84. network
Friendship is sacred. Networking is profane.
If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened. (Vinge)
85. node
Vertex
Like Katie King’s objects called “poems,” sites of literary production where language also is an actor, bodies as objects of knowledge are materialsemiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction among humans and non-humans, including the machines and other instruments that mediate exchanges at crucial interfaces and that function as delegates for other actors’ functions and purposes. (Haraway)
87. open source
Self explanatory.
The General Public License (which prohibits the appropriation of software code), the related Open Source Initiative, and certain versions of the Creative Commons license fulfill this role. They enable the protection of common use-value and use viral characteristics to spread. GPL and related material can only be used in projects that in turn put their adapted source code in the public domain. (Bauwens)
88. participation
The privilege of inclusion in a group undertaking.
For many of us, the irony made it possible to participate—indeed, to participate as fully committed, if semiotically unruly, eco-feminists. (Haraway)
90. peer
A peer of the Realm, or a source of peer pressure.
[P2P processes] make use-value freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common property regimes. This is its distribution or ‘peer property mode’: a ‘third mode of ownership,’ different from private property or public (state) property. (Bauwens)
91. peer to peer (p2p)
The less hierarchical approach to networking.
The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. (Barlow)
102. prosumerism
Getting past the false dichotomy between capital goods and consumer goods.
The web (in particular the Writeable Web and the Web 2.0 that is in the process of being established) allows for the universal autonomous production, dissemination, and ‘consumption’ of written material while the associated podcasting and webcasting developments create an ‘alternative information and communication infrastructure’ for audio and audiovisual creation. (Bauwens)
103. public
All of us.
Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the “lack of scientific certainty” inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a “primary issue.” But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I’d like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast? (Latour)
107. reductionism
The important practice of analyzing the subsystems in isolation.
Similarly, if the existence of a species is reduced to a matter of recoverable genetic information, we may be comforted about the loss of the ecosystem that it now inhabits. Still, the reader is right to think that something—perhaps the most important thing—is lost in this view. (Purdy)
108. relational
The privilege of analyzing the data points in aggregate and not only in isolation.
[Norbert Wiener] realized that one of the subtle implications of [the probabilistic] view is that messages are constituted, measured, and communicated not as things-in-themselves, but as relational differences between elements in a field. Communication is about relation, not essence. (Hayles)
116. sharing
The privilege of being able to let your guard down.
The internet’s hierarchical elements (such as the stacked IP protocols, the decentralized Domain Name System, etc…) do not deter participation. Viral communicators, or meshworks, are a logical extension of the internet. With this methodology, devices create their own networks through the use of excess capacity, bypassing the need for a pre-existing infrastructure. The ‘Community Wi-Fi’ movement, Open Spectrum advocacy, file-serving television, and alternative meshwork-based telecommunication infrastructures are exemplary of this trend. (Bauwens)
122. sousveillance
The art of seeing through mirror shades.
The flood of information has to go someplace. (Brin)
132. transparency
The neutralization of mirror shades.
The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see. (Lewis)
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.
“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
“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
“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
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.
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.
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 PensionsMany 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.
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.
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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.
“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
“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
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