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Bill Fulkerson

Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...ernist-thinking-exploding.html

capitalism power society

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17
     
    " Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Steve Bosserman

What does home mean if your bed is on the pavements of Paris? | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...d-is-on-the-pavements-of-paris

homelessness anthropology paris home

shared by Steve Bosserman on 29 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • The American anthropologist Edward Fischer, paraphrasing Aristotle, said that the good life is ‘a life worth living’, or a journey towards ‘a fulfilled life’. It has to do with happiness but is not limited to it; it’s often – perhaps counterintuitively – linked to commitment and sacrifice, to the work of becoming a particular person. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1982 described these practices as technologies of the self. According to Foucault, the self is ‘not given to us … we have to create ourselves as a work of art’. My informants on the streets of Paris were striving – in their own ways – towards being better selves. I came to understand the activities, processes and routines that they engaged in – begging, making a shelter, accessing temporary housing, etc – as practices of the self geared towards a better life, as practices of homemaking on the street, as practices of hope.
  • Aside from François, others I met on the streets of Paris – such as Sabal from India, and Alex from Kosovo – talked about their engagement in such practices of hope. Following them through soup kitchens, drop-in centres, government institutions and homeless shelters, I observed two main ways in which they attempted to push for a better life. Both of them were connected to the idea of home: my informants in Paris were longing to find and go back to a homeland, often one from the past, while on a daily basis they were struggling to construct a home in order to survive. That was what a better life looked like for them.
  • Home, according to the Australian social scientist Shelley Mallett, is always suspended between the ideal and the real. It relates to ‘the activity performed by, with or in person’s things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now.’ While Sabal’s India was part of the ideal, what Alex was dealing with was closer to the ‘real’ side of this distinction. His home-making efforts were a continuous process of daily activities.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • For many of the homeless people I’ve met in both London and Paris, home was connected to a place they departed from and have a desire to return to – a place that carried what the English sociologist Liz Kenyon calls a right to return and a sense of one’s origin. Sara Ahmed’s 1999 study of migrants’ writing, particularly Asian women living in Britain, supports this view of home as something in the longer-term future. The British-Australian scholar wrote that home is often a destination, somewhere to travel to: ‘the space which is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance – I am here – but the very space in which one finds the self as almost, but not quite, at home. In such a space, the subject has a destination, an itinerary, indeed a future, but in having such as destination, has not yet arrived.’ Home is, in this sense, not about the present – and surely not a place of passive suffering – but about one’s hopes, about making home an imagined place where one has not yet arrived.
  • Home is exactly such a process, involving the material and the imaginative, social connections and mundane acts. Routines, habits and rhythms – often as simple as regularly visiting certain neighbourhoods, shelters and food kitchens – are important parts of this process, and are deeply connected to a temporal as well as spatial order. This focus on order is best expressed in the classical analysis of home by the English anthropologist Mary Douglas:[Home] is always a localisable idea. Home is located in space but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a board, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control.
  • François, who introduced me to the labour of begging, found something close to home in his daily practices. His home was fashioned by coming face to face with the city around him. These narratives show how far removed these people are from a state of passive suffering. Yes, there were moments of idleness and, for some, long phases of pain. But most of the people I met sleeping rough – independent of age, gender, tenure on the street and level of addiction – were striving, in their way, towards a better life: first on, and hopefully off, the street.
Bill Fulkerson

Links 8/3/17 | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...links-8317.html

climate change us

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 03 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • uarterBack August 3, 2017 at 8:31 am Re NYT Hacking Wars story, I have long had the same “self-licking ice cream cone” concerns. The military industrial complex has been slowly shaping polic opinion to make “kenetic” response to cyber attacks palatable. Consider this 2013 article: https://armscontrolnow.org/2013/05/30/is-there-a-place-for-nuclear-deterrence-in-cyberspace/ Cyber as a Casus Belli has two inherent fatal flaws in its inability to accurately prove attribution and the extent of damage. The former makes it impossible to know if a counter attack is against a party that had any role in the original cyber attack, and the latter makes it impossible to prove or verify harm, which is the foundation of the “proportional response” required under the international laws of war. These two flaws can raise the potential of false flags to a new level. Do we really want to shed blood of untold numbers of military and civilian soles because of a report of a unattributable cyber attack on a purported “crital infrastructure component” that nobody every heard of,and that cannot be confirmed as existing in the first place? Gulf of Tonkin, eat your heart out. Look no further than our present history. We are slowly moving towards war with Russia based on the premise of a cyber attack that may, or may not, have actually happened, and no one has been allowed to inspect the physical servers related to the claimed attack. International laws of war should be clear that kenetic response to cyber attacks must be off the table. The only acceptable proportionate attacks should e economic or offensive cyber. Full stop.
Bill Fulkerson

Asymmetric Information and the Pecking (Dis)Order* | Review of Finance | Oxford Academic - 0 views

academic.oup.com/...5736146

order finance information

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 05 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 05 Oct 20
     
    We study the classical problem of raising capital under asymmetric information. Following Myers and Majluf, we consider firms endowed with assets in place and riskier growth opportunities. When asymmetric information is concentrated on assets in place (rather than growth opportunities), equity-like securities are more likely to be optimal. In contrast, when asymmetric information falls on growth options, debt is optimal. Intuitively, this happens because when the asset with greater volatility is less affected by asymmetric information, issuing a security with greater exposure to upside potential (such as equity) can be less dilutive than issuing a security lacking such exposure (such as debt). Our results suggest that equity is more likely to dominate debt for younger firms with larger investment needs, endowed with riskier, more valuable growth opportunities. Thus, our model can explain why high-growth firms may prefer equity over debt, and then switch to debt financing as they mature.
Steve Bosserman

How to Measure Your City's 'Anti-Social Capital' - 0 views

www.citylab.com/...582211

security cities social capital trust inequality disparity usa

shared by Steve Bosserman on 08 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.
  • The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.
Bill Fulkerson

The Infinite Suburb Is an Academic Joke | The American Conservative - 0 views

www.theamericanconservative.com/...ite-suburb-is-an-academic-joke

suburbs cities

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 30 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 30 Oct 17
     
    "I will tell you without ceremony what the future actually holds for the inhabited terrain of North America. The big cities will have to contract severely and the process will be fraught and disorderly. The action will move to the small cities and small towns, especially the places that have a meaningful relationship with farming, food production, and the continent's inland waterways. The suburbs have three destinies, none of them mutually exclusive: slums, salvage, and ruins. The future has mandates of its own. If we want to remain civilized, we will be compelled to return to a landscape composed of relationships between town and country, at a scale that comports with the resource realities of the future. These days the failure of American imagination, especially at the university level, is epic."
Steve Bosserman

Beyond Prisons, Mental Health Clinics: When Austerity Opens Cages, Where Do the Service... - 0 views

www.politicalresearch.org/...cages-where-do-the-services-go

policy change mental health neoliberalism research incarceration prisons political

shared by Steve Bosserman on 02 May 18 - No Cached
  • Today, states grapple with decarceration and deinstitutionalization, not necessarily because of an ethical recognition of the continuing harm of confinement and segregation, or because of an understanding of the intertwined histories of capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, and punishment in the United States, but because of a desire to curb public spending on social services. These include the very services that people need as alternatives to more oppressive edifices and as preventive measures to winding up in such places. While public neighborhood urban schools, public housing, and mental health clinics are shuttered, private companies and “not for profit” services partially fill the void.
  • Alternatives emerge when facilities shut their doors. Closures, as prison justice organizer Angela Davis suggests, provide an opportunity for not only a “radical imagining” of the kind of social landscape desperately needed—but also the moment to build it. As people move between different forms and scales of cages, and as patterns of surveillance and punishment morph, new forms of capture do emerge and yet resistance is also possible. The state often refuses to offer services in place of the ones that were shuttered, leaving the responsibility to the individual (or her family and the market). This is a moment to collectively demand, fund, and build public infrastructure that will move everyone closer towards a world that does not rely on segregation and confinement, or access to private capital, as its mode of dealing with structural inequities.
Steve Bosserman

Place Matters - 0 views

prospect.org/...place-matters

unemployment new deal

shared by Steve Bosserman on 11 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 11 Jul 17
     
    See: Resettlement Administration guidelines by RG Tugwell for New Deal policies
Steve Bosserman

How Gaston Bachelard gave the emotions of home a philosophy - Gillian Darley | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...-emotions-of-home-a-philosophy

space intimacy philosophy architecture

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 May 18 - No Cached
  • As Foucault said of Bachelard a few years later, his characteristic approach was to avoid all defined hierarchies, any universal judgments: ‘He plays against his own culture with his own culture.’ He stood apart, separating himself from the mainstream, finding cracks, dissonances, minor phenomena that he could make his own. Poetry of every description was his raw material.
  • Indoors, in The Poetics of Space, the journey into intimacy is neatly evoked by drawers, cupboards, wardrobes and above all locks, although he warns, somewhat testily, against their use as gratuitous metaphors (and he is strongly averse to the idea of habit).
  • The wellbeing of the warm animal (or human) protected in its nest or cocoon or cottage from the bad weather raging outside is a primitive sense of refuge that we can all share, adult or child. The appeal of a safe haven translates into domestic architecture with such features as the accommodating Arts and Crafts inglenook, seats close by the fire, Frank Lloyd Wright’s enduring penchant for an immense fireplace buried at the core of a house, or even, a favourite 1960s touch, the conversation pit – with or without its trademark shagpile carpet.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Late in life, Auden wrote a set of 15 verses titled Thanksgiving for a Habitat (1960-1964). They were a celebration of domestic contentment in his Austrian cottage, and were structured around the rooms of the house, including ‘the Cave of Meaning’ (his study), the cellar, the attic, and his bedroom ‘the Cave of Nakedness’. In the title poem he ends, happily, writing of ‘a place I may go both in and out of’.
  • The ‘cupboardness’ of children’s play areas; a library tucked beneath some stairs; a universe of emotions in the corner
  • In his neat phrase ‘reading a room’, Bachelard encouraged readers to think of some place in their own past: ‘You have unlocked a door to daydreaming.’
Steve Bosserman

Realignment and Legitimacy - 1 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...pm-water-cooler-6-12-2018.html

shared by Steve Bosserman on 13 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • “The Constitutional Crisis Is Now” [Robert Reich, The American Prospect]. “If [Trump] refuses to accept the results [the 2020] election, as he threatened to do if he lost the 2016 election, he will have to be forcefully removed from office.” This is lunacy. In 2016, liberal Democrats floated the idea that “faithless electors” in the Electoral College should not appoint Trump — based on information from the “intelligence community” that the public was not allowed to see. From that day to this, liberal Democrats haven’t accepted the results of 2016, which is what the “Clinton won the popular vote” amounts to. Is the inability to look in the mirror a 10%-er deformation professionnelle?
  • “The Democratic Party unraveling is not good for America” [Ed Rogers, WaPo]. “The Democratic Party is not functioning as an umbrella organization or even a coalition. Instead, activists from Tom Steyer to George Soros to Planned Parenthood are operating independently*, doing things a political party otherwise would. These independent actors are pushing pet causes. Traditional party building isn’t one of them. Campaign finance reform and communication technologies have empowered wealthy individuals and collateral groups while at the same time inhibiting parties and individual campaigns. I say this not to kick the Democratic Party while it is down but because I believe in the two-party system…. We need reforms that empower parties and candidates and diminish the influence of deep-pocketed plutocrats and narrowly focused interest groups.” Rogers is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush White Houses, but he’s not wrong. NOTE * Maybe. When you start thinking, it’s hard to know where the boundaries of the Democrat Party really are. For example, are journalists who propagate Brock talking points in the party, or not? My instinct is to say that they are, but how is an institution with fluid boundaries like that to be named and categorized? Or how about an organization like Emily’s List, ostensibly independent, but directing donors only to Democrats? (And Donna Shalala, but not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Or Cynthia Nixon. Or Zephyr Teachout. Really, Emily’s List? Really?)
  • UPDATE “One-time Ohio congressional district candidate arrested while streaming incident live on Facebook” [WHIOTV-7]. This is Sam Ronan, who ran for DNC chair and had good things to say about election rigging. The odd thing about this story, and everything I’ve seen on the Twitter, is that he was arrested at his house, and nobody is saying why the cops were there in the first place. Readers?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • UPDATE “Maine Supreme Judicial Court rules ranked-choice voting unconstitutional” [Bangor Daily News]. From May, still germane: “In a unanimous, 44-page opinion issued Tuesday, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s seven justices agreed with Attorney General Janet Mills, Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap and Republican legislators that the system violates a provision of the Maine Constitution that allows elections to be won by pluralities — and not necessarily majorities — of votes.” The political establishment really, really hates RCV.
  • Bill Fulkerson on 13 Jun 18
     
    "Realignment and Legitimacy "The Constitutional Crisis Is Now" [Robert Reich, The American Prospect]. "If [Trump] refuses to accept the results [the 2020] election, as he threatened to do if he lost the 2016 election, he will have to be forcefully removed from office." This is lunacy. In 2016, liberal Democrats floated the idea that "faithless electors" in the Electoral College should not appoint Trump - based on information from the "intelligence community" that the public was not allowed to see. From that day to this, liberal Democrats haven't accepted the results of 2016, which is what the "Clinton won the popular vote" amounts to. Is the inability to look in the mirror a 10%-er deformation professionnelle? "The Democratic Party unraveling is not good for America" [Ed Rogers, WaPo]. "The Democratic Party is not functioning as an umbrella organization or even a coalition. Instead, activists from Tom Steyer to George Soros to Planned Parenthood are operating independently*, doing things a political party otherwise would. These independent actors are pushing pet causes. Traditional party building isn't one of them. Campaign finance reform and communication technologies have empowered wealthy individuals and collateral groups while at the same time inhibiting parties and individual campaigns. I say this not to kick the Democratic Party while it is down but because I believe in the two-party system…. We need reforms that empower parties and candidates and diminish the influence of deep-pocketed plutocrats and narrowly focused interest groups." Rogers is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush White Houses, but he's not wrong. NOTE * Maybe. When you start thinking, it's hard to know where the boundaries of the Democrat Party really are. For example, are journalists who propagate Brock talking points in the party, or not? My instinct is to say that they are, but how is an institution with fluid boundaries like that to be named and cate
Bill Fulkerson

Is global history still possible, or has it had its moment? | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...sible-or-has-it-had-its-moment

globalism networks Castells

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 08 Mar 17
     
    "Global history faces two seemingly opposite challenges for an inter-dependent, over-heating planet. If we are going to muster meaningful narratives about the togetherness of strangers near and far, we are going to have to be more global and get more serious about engaging other languages and other ways of telling history. Historians and their reader-citizens are also going to have to re-signify the place of local attachments and meanings. Going deeper into the stories of Others afar and Strangers at home means dispensing with the idea that global integration was like an electric circuit, bringing light to the connected. Becoming inter-dependent is not just messier than drawing a wiring diagram. It means reckoning with dimensions of networks and circuits that global historians - and possibly all narratives of cosmopolitan convergence - leave out of the story: lighting up corners of the earth leaves others in the dark.  The story of the globalists illuminates some at the expense of others, the left behind, the ones who cannot move, and those who become immobilised because the light no longer shines on them."
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