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Bill Fulkerson

Diverse interactions and ecosystem engineering can stabilize community assembly | Natur... - 0 views

www.nature.com/...s41467-020-17164-x

engineering interactions assembly communications community ecosystem

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 06 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 06 Jul 20
     
    The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact directly with each other and indirectly through environmental effects, however to our knowledge the role of these ecosystem engineers has not been considered in ecological network models. Here we explore the dynamics of ecosystem assembly, where species colonization and extinction depends on the constraints imposed by trophic, service, and engineering dependencies. We show that our assembly model reproduces many key features of ecological systems, such as the role of generalists during assembly, realistic maximum trophic levels, and increased nestedness with mutualistic interactions. We find that ecosystem engineering has large and nonlinear effects on extinction rates. While small numbers of engineers reduce stability by increasing primary extinctions, larger numbers of engineers increase stability by reducing primary extinctions and extinction cascade magnitude. Our results suggest that ecological engineers may enhance community diversity while increasing persistence by facilitating colonization and limiting competitive exclusion.
Bill Fulkerson

Five years in, China's Belt and Road looks like a giant debt trap - FreightWaves - 0 views

www.freightwaves.com/...oad-looks-like-giant-debt-trap

debt road china

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 30 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 30 Aug 18
     
    "Regardless of its provenance, the idea that debt and war are the two primary ways to control a nation is a great insight into the current geopolitical situation, especially the rise of China. China has benefited from the world order created by American military dominance, with its 11 carrier groups and hundreds of military bases straddling the globe. China is motivated by national pride and economic self-interest to extend its sphere of influence, but many of its thinkers are ideologically opposed to replicating the American model, a militarism that they still call 'Western imperialism'. "
Bill Fulkerson

Our Revolution's Logic - The American Mind - 0 views

americanmind.org/...our-revolutions-logic

revolution logic

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 03 Jun 20
     
    The primary objective of any people who find themselves in the throes of a revolution is to find ways of diverting its logic from its worst conclusions.
Steve Bosserman

Here's How Facebook Actually Won Trump the Presidency | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...mp-election-not-just-fake-news

social media conversation coverage politics elections

shared by Steve Bosserman on 21 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—however controversial those conversations often were. Bleeker says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned from this election cycle is that social media is increasingly going to be part of any candidate’s so-called “earned media strategy”—that is, the coverage a candidate gets for free in the press. The President-elect has shown he can turn a news cycle in 140 characters or less; in a recent 60 Minutes interview, he said he plans to continue using Twitter as president. “He’s going to tell his side of the story from the digital bully pulpit,” Lira says. Whether fake news did or didn’t affect the election’s outcome, Facebook as a platform did. The winning candidate was not just willing, but eager to break with traditional models of campaigning. His team invested in new ways of using the digital tools and platforms that have come to dominate the media landscape. Anyone who wants to defeat him in the future will have to do the same.
Steve Bosserman

Why Didn't America Become Part of the Modern World? - 0 views

eand.co/-the-modern-world-dac6d65e9015

failed state modernity usa poverty

shared by Steve Bosserman on 09 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.
  • So in America, poverty wasn’t seen as a social bad or ill — it was seen as a necessary way to discipline, punish, and control those with a lack of virtue, a deficit of strength, to, by hitting them with its stick, to inculcate the virtues of hard work, temperance, industriousness, and above all, self-reliance. The problem, of course, was that the great lesson of history was that none of this was true — poverty didn’t lead to virtue. It only led to ruin.
  • So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial. History is teaching us the same lesson, all over again. Americans might not even learn it the second time around. But the world, laughing in horror, in astonishment, in bewilderment, should.
Steve Bosserman

High score, low pay: why the gig economy loves gamification | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ivers-ride-hailing-gig-economy

gamification gig economy taxi service incentive productivity profit

shared by Steve Bosserman on 23 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Simply defined, gamification is the use of game elements – point-scoring, levels, competition with others, measurable evidence of accomplishment, ratings and rules of play – in non-game contexts. Games deliver an instantaneous, visceral experience of success and reward, and they are increasingly used in the workplace to promote emotional engagement with the work process, to increase workers’ psychological investment in completing otherwise uninspiring tasks, and to influence, or “nudge”, workers’ behaviour.
  • According to Burawoy, production at Allied was deliberately organised by management to encourage workers to play the game. When work took the form of a game, Burawoy observed, something interesting happened: workers’ primary source of conflict was no longer with the boss. Instead, tensions were dispersed between workers (the scheduling man, the truckers, the inspectors), between operators and their machines, and between operators and their own physical limitations (their stamina, precision of movement, focus). The battle to beat the quota also transformed a monotonous, soul-crushing job into an exciting outlet for workers to exercise their creativity, speed and skill. Workers attached notions of status and prestige to their output, and the game presented them with a series of choices throughout the day, affording them a sense of relative autonomy and control. It tapped into a worker’s desire for self-determination and self-expression. Then, it directed that desire towards the production of profit for their employer.
  • Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification – a dozen new likes or retweets – but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioural psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules – unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback – to condition players into playing just one more round.
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  • Gaming the game, Burawoy observed, allowed workers to assert some limited control over the labour process, and to “make out” as a result. In turn, that win had the effect of reproducing the players’ commitment to playing, and their consent to the rules of the game. When players were unsuccessful, their dissatisfaction was directed at the game’s obstacles, not at the capitalist class, which sets the rules. The inbuilt antagonism between the player and the game replaces, in the mind of the worker, the deeper antagonism between boss and worker. Learning how to operate cleverly within the game’s parameters becomes the only imaginable option. And now there is another layer interposed between labour and capital: the algorithm.
Bill Fulkerson

The Federal Job Guarantee Is Not Just "Better" Than a Universal Basic Income. It's the ... - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...sal-basic-income-sinister.html

ubi

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 28 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • UBI adds money to the economy without increasing production or output. This is how you cause inflation: The creation of money without consideration of the real resources available to you.
  • FJG adds money to the economy by increasing productivity and output. This is how you avoid, or greatly reduce the severity of, inflation. It forces private industry and the military to up their game, in order to be competitive with the FJG: better than bare-minimum living wage, benefits, and working conditions.
  • If the FJG creates “busywork” pointless jobs, it is not a problem of the FJG itself, but rather a reflection of poor implementation of the FJG at the local level. There are basically an infinite number of genuinely useful things to be done at the local level, throughout the country.
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  • The fear of automation is nonsense. We should embrace automation. Robots can cook our cheeseburgers, wash our cars, and accept and dispense cash better and faster than humans. But robots cannot take care of our children or seniors, they cannot entertain us, create works of art, write our books, or be our primary care physicians or psychologists. Leave the more physically taxing and repetitive drudgery work to the robots. Leave the infinite number of more satisfying and productive jobs for us humans.
Bill Fulkerson

America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People - Evonomics - 0 views

evonomics.com/ssing-developing-nation-people

america developing nation

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 01 May 17 - No Cached
  • In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check. The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. Social and economic mobility is low. Check.
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