TheCommons--Spaces-Thoughts-Economics

The History Commons website is an experiment in open-content civic journalism. It provides a space for people to conduct grassroots-level investigations on any issue, providing the public with a useful tool to conduct oversight of government and private sector entities.

The site has been allowed to expire, but can still be found in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The personal blog of one of academia's many "adjuncts", those who've responded to the stubborn refusal of many institutions to create full time teaching positions by stringing together part time teaching jobs. The author eventually left teaching.

A little reality for a chance. Blog post about outsourcing. No, it's not good press.

Debunking a much fudged statistic

commons blog from Germany

Perhaps what is going on here is a new kind of crisis/tragedy of the commons. Unlike the old commons that gets fished-out or over-grazed, the digital commons appears to be this endless supply of storage and bandwidth. However obviously those things do cost money to someone, and while both have gotten cheaper, in the volume being used by YouTube or Facebook, it adds up quickly.

David Brooks, in an op / ed piece to the New York times, discovers that participation in the market does not magically transform human beings into the rational beings that one could easily see that they aren't by ... oh, say, talking to them.

Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York times writes in praise of third world sweatshops. I swear I'm not making this up, and he does an excellent job of selling something truly monstrous to those who think that Economics is a science. Found on Furl.

Ah, all of this, and you get paid $1200-$1500 / semester, IF your class doesn't get cancelled, and I would know about the salary. I was about to become one of those adjuncts, teaching introductory probability and statistics, when I found that only three students at that college were willing to sign up for that class, listed in the schedule as being taught by the well known Prof.Staff. (He gets around a lot). I still remember walking down the street, wondering what happened, when passing a line of people hoping to get into a class that did seem to be of interest to students - "finding your animal spirit guide". No, I'm not making that up. A little about the "privileged" life that the backbreaking work they did in graduate school made possible, for so many, while the former frat boy executives who drank and cheated their way through school have so often ended up having to struggle by on six figure incomes, as they stare forlornly out their corner office windows. I'm not guessing about the frat boys. I've tutored and graded the papers of a number of these "achievers". A little more truth about life in the so-called land of opportunity, in the Postmodern Era.

But the distinction between "common" and "public" is not one that most people in most circumstances wish to preserve. Indeed, one of the functions of democratically-grounded government is to seek to functionally eliminate that distinction for its citizenry as much as possible in terms of their day-to-day lives.

book on the history of internet commons by David Bollier

In The Household, he [Robert Ellickson] now turns his attention to the ways in which we informally manage the cooking, cleaning, finances and other tasks needed to operate a household. I like the name that Ellickson gives for this universe of norms - "homeways."