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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
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.
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  • 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.
Steve Bosserman

Families and children in the next system - 0 views

women children economic disparity

shared by Steve Bosserman on 01 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 01 Dec 18
     
    "This paper explores the current deficiencies in the way the United States supports children and families and shows how a new economic model-a "next system," based in part on the best practices currently in use somewhere in the world-might better provide for flourishing families and children, both in the United States and around the world. We consider current policies, both international and domestic, that seem to provide the best results in today's global economic system. We then suggest how these "best practices" might be incorporated into a larger model for family and child well-being in "the next system." We proceed to consider new ideas not yet implemented that can improve outcomes, and, finally, suggest some pragmatic, step-by-step strategies for moving toward a world that offers the best possible outcomes for all." https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/families-and-children-next-system
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
Bill Fulkerson

The Decision Matrix: How to Prioritize What Matters - 0 views

fs.blog/decision-matrix

decisionmaking

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 20 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 20 Sep 18
     
    "Consequential and irreversible decisions are the ones that you really need to focus on. All of the time I saved from using this matrix didn't allow me to sip drinks on the beach. Rather, I invested it in the most important decisions, the ones I couldn't justify delegating. I also had another rule that proved helpful: unless the decision needed to be made on the spot, as some operational decisions do, I would take a 30-minute walk first. The key to successfully employing this in practice was to make sure everyone was on same page with the terms of consequential and reversible. At first, people checked with me but later, as the terms became clear, they just started deciding."
Bill Fulkerson

Victorian Central Banks and the Myth of Independence | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...l-banks-myth-independence.html

capitalism banks myth

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "The current paradigm of independent, inflation targeting central banks thus obscures the messy history of central banks as public institutions. Since their inception, monetary authorities have performed various different roles; while they served as guardians of price stability in Victorian England, they have originally served as developmental and fiscal agents for expansionary states, and have frequently continued to do so in the centuries since. Treating central bank independence as an ahistorical best practice approach is misleading, and we should recall that there have been alternatives to the current framework. As some have heralded the end of the era of central bank independence, while others have underscored the benefits of re-politicizing monetary policy, it is worth bearing this history in mind."
Bill Fulkerson

The Profit Hoarders - 0 views

jacobinmag.com/...vestment-profits-united-states

profit capitalism

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 17
     
    "If corporations returned to the practices of the pre-neoliberal era (1952-1983, to be precise), stuffing not half but less than a fifth of their cash flow in their shareholders' pockets, that could take net investment back to its old average. But under today's model of capitalism, it's more important to keep the shareholders happy."
Steve Bosserman

Rediscovering Our Nature Instinct - 0 views

undark.org/...iscovering-our-nature-instinct

perception existentialism instinct nature insight

shared by Steve Bosserman on 08 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • humans have a special capacity for perceiving and even anticipating natural phenomena and its patterns.
  • This innate sense has been largely forgotten, according to Gooley, because modern lifestyles demand we engage in mostly logical, deductive thinking, rather than using our intuition. Our ability to extract meaning from interrelated phenomena such as bird behavior, wind direction, plant growth, and sunlight has atrophied. By searching out these relationships and patterns in nature, Gooley writes, he has rediscovered a manner of experiencing the outdoors through intuition. With some practice, he assures us that we can, too.
  • Gooley describes the nature instinct as an awareness of the outdoors that allows him to observe and understand before conscious thought. He can sense direction from a tree or predict the behavior of animals, and only afterwards analyzes how he knew these things to be true. While he uses gut feeling or the sixth sense (a common but debunked theory of navigational aptitude in the 19th century and early 20th century), he settles instead on the term “fast thinking.”
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  • What makes us unique as a species — in ancient and modern form — seems to be the complexity of thought and diversity of cultural practices we use to accomplish highly-skilled tasks such as navigation or problem solving. Whether we grow up tracking animals in the Kalahari or riding subways to school, humans seem able to switch quickly between intuitive and analytical modes, to both directly experience and step out of that experience and employ logic.
  • Through deciphering nature, he ventures that we can develop a more metaphysical understanding of the world: the ability to discern the big picture from many parts. “God,” he writes, “is only shorthand for the belief that there is some deeper meaning behind the things we sense and beneath the universe as a whole.”
Steve Bosserman

Are You Creditworthy? The Algorithm Will Decide. - 0 views

undark.org/...redit-scoring-machine-learning

algorithms discrimination bias credit scoring

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 May 18 - No Cached
  • The decisions made by algorithmic credit scoring applications are not only said to be more accurate in predicting risk than traditional scoring methods; its champions argue they are also fairer because the algorithm is unswayed by the racial, gender, and socioeconomic biases that have skewed access to credit in the past.
  • Algorithmic credit scores might seem futuristic, but these practices do have roots in credit scoring practices of yore. Early credit agencies, for example, hired human reporters to dig into their customers’ credit histories. The reports were largely compiled from local gossip and colored by the speculations of the predominantly white, male middle class reporters. Remarks about race and class, asides about housekeeping, and speculations about sexual orientation all abounded.
  • By 1935, whole neighborhoods in the U.S. were classified according to their credit characteristics. A map from that year of Greater Atlanta comes color-coded in shades of blue (desirable), yellow (definitely declining) and red (hazardous). The legend recalls a time when an individual’s chances of receiving a mortgage were shaped by their geographic status.
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  • These systems are fast becoming the norm. The Chinese Government is now close to launching its own algorithmic “Social Credit System” for its 1.4 billion citizens, a metric that uses online data to rate trustworthiness. As these systems become pervasive, and scores come to stand for individual worth, determining access to finance, services, and basic freedoms, the stakes of one bad decision are that much higher. This is to say nothing of the legitimacy of using such algorithmic proxies in the first place. While it might seem obvious to call for greater transparency in these systems, with machine learning and massive datasets it’s extremely difficult to locate bias. Even if we could peer inside the black box, we probably wouldn’t find a clause in the code instructing the system to discriminate against the poor, or people of color, or even people who play too many video games. More important than understanding how these scores get calculated is giving users meaningful opportunities to dispute and contest adverse decisions that are made about them by the algorithm.
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