Skip to main content

Home/ GAVNet Collaborative Curation/ Group items tagged class

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Bill Fulkerson

Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto - 0 views

  • As Kevin Slavin says in Design as Participation, “You’re Not Stuck In Traffic—You Are Traffic.”3
Steve Bosserman

Snapchat update: Election Day-themed filters urge millennials to get out and vote - 0 views

  • It's a logical move for Snapchat to encourage its users to vote. The app reaches 41% of all 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. daily, a Nielsen study reported, according to the Wall Street Journal. Another survey conducted for Variety by Defy Media revealed that 30% of Snapchat users used the app to get news for the 2016 presidential campaign.  Millennials — people between the ages of 18 through 35 — make up approximately 31% of the overall electorate, NPR reported. It is also the group that has had the lowest voter turnout out of any other age group — just 46% voted in the 2012 presidential election. 
Steve Bosserman

Social Media's Globe-Shaking Power - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For people who like an orderly, predictable world, this is the scariest thing about Facebook; not that it may be full of lies (a problem that could potentially be fixed), but that its scope gives it real power to change history in bold, unpredictable ways.
  • One is the ubiquity of Facebook, which has reached a truly epic scale. Last month the company reported that about 1.8 billion people now log on to the service every month. Because social networks feed off the various permutations of interactions among people, they become strikingly more powerful as they grow. With about a quarter of the world’s population now on Facebook, the possibilities are staggering.
  • Thanks to the internet, now each person with once-maligned views can see that he’s not alone. And when these people find one another, they can do things — create memes, publications and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream.
Bill Fulkerson

Financialization impedes climate change mitigation: Evidence from the early American so... - 0 views

  • Finance is an essential component of industrial change because it allows technologies to be developed before they can generate a return. But if finance no longer serves industrial change but instead prioritizes rent-seeking (seeking to increase its share of existing wealth without creating new sources of wealth), creative destruction of the present carbon-intensive industrial system cannot occur. The aim of this article is to investigate this issue through a study of the emergence of one low-carbon industry, solar photovoltaics (PV) in the United States. The focus is on the period after the first oil shock in 1973 until the end of the 1980s. The case is contrasted with the more successful development of the industry in Japan. In the late 1970s, American firms held 90% of the global market share; by 2005, it had declined to under 10%, whereas the Japanese share had risen to almost 50% (9). Changes to corporate governance and organization brought by financialization are identified as major causes of the difference in outcome.
  • One camp consisted of a small number of entrepreneurs who had been involved in producing solar cells for the space program or pioneered their application on Earth.
  • The other camp consisted of the energy policy bureaucracy and closely affiliated large manufacturing and energy corporations along with utilities (65).
Steve Bosserman

The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious - Samir Chopra | Aeon E... - 0 views

  • A general term is useful only if it subsumes related concepts in such a way that semantic value is added. If our comprehension is not increased by our chosen generalised term, then we shouldn’t use it. A common claim such as ‘they stole my intellectual property’ is singularly uninformative, since the general term ‘intellectual property’ obscures more than it illuminates. If copyright infringement is alleged, we try to identify the copyrightable concrete expression, the nature of the infringement and so on. If patent infringement is alleged, we check another set of conditions (does the ‘new’ invention replicate the design of the older one?), and so on for trademarks (does the offending symbol substantially and misleadingly resemble the protected trademark?) and trade secrets (did the enterprise attempt to keep supposedly protected information secret?) The use of the general term ‘intellectual property’ tells us precisely nothing.
  • Property is a legally constructed, historically contingent, social fact. It is founded on economic and social imperatives to distribute and manage material resources – and, thus, wealth and power. As the preface to a legal textbook puts it, legal systems of property ‘confer benefits and impose burdens’ on owners and nonowners respectively. Law defines property. It circumscribes the conditions under which legal subjects may acquire, and properly use and dispose of their property and that of others. It makes concrete the ‘natural right’ of holding property. Different sets of rules create systems with varying allocations of power for owners and others. Some grants of property rights lock in, preserve and reinforce existing relations of race, class or gender, stratifying society and creating new, entrenched, propertied classes. Law makes property part of our socially constructed reality, reconfigurable if social needs change.
  • ‘Property’ is a legal term with overwhelming emotive, expressive and rhetorical impact. It is regarded as the foundation of a culture and as the foundation of an economic system. It pervades our moral sense, our normative order. It has ideological weight and propaganda value. To use the term ‘intellectual property’ is to partake of property’s expressive impact in an economic and political order constructed by property’s legal rights. It is to suggest that if property is at play, then it can be stolen, and therefore must be protected with the same zeal that the homeowner guards her home against invaders and thieves.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • What about the common objection that without ‘intellectual property’ the proverbial starving artist would be at the mercy of giant corporations, who have existing market share and first-mover advantage? It is important to disaggregate the necessity and desirability of the protections of the various legal regimes of copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets from that of the language of ‘intellectual property’. Current copyright, patent, trade-secret and trademark law do not need to be completely rejected. Their aims are rather more modest: the reconfiguration of legal rules and protections in an economy and culture in which the nature of creative goods and how they are made, used, shared, modified and distributed has changed. Such advocacy is not against, for instance, copyright protections. Indeed, in the domain of free and open-source software, it is copyright law – through the use of artfully configured software licences that do not restrain users in the way that traditional proprietary software licences do – that protects developers and users. And neither do copyright reformers argue that plagiarists be somehow rewarded; they do not advocate that anyone should be able to take a copyrighted work, put their name on it, and sell it.
  • This public domain is ours to draw upon for future use. The granting of temporary leases to various landlords to extract monopoly rent should be recognised for what it is: a limited privilege for our benefit. The use of ‘intellectual property’ is a rhetorical move by one partner in this conversation, the one owning the supposed ‘property right’. There is no need for us to play along, to confuse one kind of property with another or, for that matter, to even consider the latter kind of object any kind of property at all. Doing so will not dismantle the elaborate structures of rules we have built in order to incentivise artistic and scientific work. Rather, it will make it possible for that work to continue.
Steve Bosserman

The Big Day is Here - Dave Pell - Medium - 0 views

  • And we’re voting in an American election at a moment when antisemitism (and racism, fascism, xenophobia, fear-mongering, etc.) is once again on the rise in places as far as Poland, Germany, and Hungary, and as close as Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.While she understands that everything is political, my mom is far from being a rabid partisan. The morning after Trump’s election, she said, “He deserves a chance to lead.” Well, he’s been given that chance. And politicians across the country have been given the chance to decide how to respond to his brand of leadership.
Steve Bosserman

OPINION: Let's follow New Zealand's lead in how we measure well-being | Ensia - 0 views

  • In New Zealand, a new generation of leadership has arisen, symbolized by Ardern: wise to the danger our planet is in; alive to the opportunities of a greener, fairer society; and not beholden to the outdated economic doctrines that have led us into this predicament. In New Zealand, GDP will no longer be the sole measure of success for economic policies, because GDP is not, and has never been, the best or only way to measure social development. In many ways, New Zealand’s new approach is a return to a more honest, more grounded way of practicing economics, more rooted in the real world, as Makhlouf explains. “Economics is about trade-offs,” he says. “Economics is about the fact that there are finite resources to meet unlimited wants and what’s the best way of dealing with that problem. What the Treasury is suggesting now is that we can become a bit more sophisticated than in the past at making those trade-offs.”
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 137 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page