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anonymous

The Myth of the Yellow Peril: Overhyping Chinese Migration into Russia - 0 views

www.russiablog.org/...post_15.php

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 20 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Since 1989 the population of the Russian Far East declined by 14% to 6.7 million in 2002; shorn of subsidies from the center, it is now dependent on the rest of East Asia for food and consumer imports. It sits next to Chinese Manchuria (the provinces of Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin), an environmentally-strained rust belt of 108 million souls. Thus it is not surprising to see American geopolitical jockeys, Russian xenophobes and anti-Putin "liberals" alike (i.e. Radio Free Europe's Aleksandr Golts and Echo Moskvi Radio's Yulia Latynina, etc) claiming that a stealth demographic invasion of Russia is well underway which will in a few years result in a Chinese Far East.
  • The issue of Chinese migration to Russia and its political consequences starts with one main question - how many of them are there? All reputable estimates are in the range of 200,000 to 400,000, with 500.000 as the absolute maximum, most of them shuttle traders or seasonal laborers. The academic Gel'bras first came with these figures in 2001, based on adding up numbers from separate towns and regions.
  • Most migrants come from cities or small towns, and only 20% from villages - although the latter figure is higher in Moscow. Only 5% were employed in agriculture back in China. 38% were "workers" and 11% were "worker-peasants". Although only 6% admitted they had been unemployed, the real figure is much higher since 70% of workers and 68% of worker peasants said they migrated because they couldn't find a job in China.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Chinese Migration - Facts, Objectivity and Subjectivity: a Kazakh perspective. As in Russia, they massively overstate the Chinese presence, mixed marriages, etc. Ironically twice as many Kazakhs visit China every year than vice versa. What's happening with Chinese expansion in Russia?: a comprehensive and sarcastic recounting of prior alarmist estimates of the numbers of Chinese in Russia. The Russian vector in global Chinese migration: notes that the alarmism of the 1990's and early 2000's is dwindling away and being replaced by more scientific views of Chinese migration to Russia. Notes that Russian migration as a share of total Chinese global migration is tiny - as of 1990, the total number of Chinese overseas was about 37mn, including 30% of the population in Malaysia, 10% in Thailand, 17% in Brunei and 4% in Indonesia. Lots of other stuff.
  • I will now go beyond demography into geopolitics. China is not the monolith that it is usually painted as in the West; its strong central government conceals a greater deal of simmer, dynamism and regionalism.
  • China aimed to achieve three geopolitical aims in the following order:
  • 1) Maintain central authority over the commercial seaboard and the peasant hinterland 2) Surround itself by a buffer of vassal states on land - Tibet, Sinkiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, etc. 3) Build a strong navy to repel sea-based foreign predation, protect its trade and extend its influence over East Asia. Now and in the future, China is going to have cope with a panoply of threats to those geopolitical goals - rising inequalities, a disconnected bureaucracy, ethnic separatism and American and Japanese sea power. In other words, it's going to have its hands full and Chinese willingness to pursue reconciliation and friendship with Russia is a reflection of its need for a safe strategic rear (see Sino-Russian Relations in China Debates the Future Security Environment, Michael Pillsbury).
  • anonymous on 20 Oct 10
     
    "One of the staples of alarmist, pessimistic and/or Russophobic (not to mention Sinophobic) commentary on Russian demography is a reworking of the yellow peril thesis. In these fevered imaginations, Chinese supposedly swim across the Amur River in their millions, establishing village communes in the taiga, and breeding prolifically so as to displace ethnic Russians and revert Khabarovsk and Vladivostok back to their rightful Qing Dynasty-era names, Boli and Haisanwei." By Anatoly Karlin at Russia Blog on April 1, 2009.
anonymous

New Statesman - Facebook, capitalism and geek entitlement - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...social-facebook-geek-women

economics society technology

shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - Cached
  • The film's basic formula is the familiar blogs-to-bling-and-bitches redemptive parable of male geek culture, with the added bonus that it happens to be based on real events. The protagonist, Facebook's co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, is a brilliant 19-year-old coder. His painful social ineptitude, as told here, gets him savagely dumped by his girlfriend, after which, drunk and misunderstood, he sets up a website to rate the physical attractiveness of the women undergraduates of Harvard, thus exacting his revenge upon the female sex that has so cruelly spurned his obvious genius.
  • The Social Network is an expertly crafted and exhaustively modern film, and one of its more pertinent flashpoints is the reminder that a resource that redefined the human interactions of 500 million people across the globe was germinated in an act of vengeful misogyny.
  • This is no reflection on the personal moral compass of Sorkin, who is no misogynist, but who understands that in rarefied American circles of power and privilege, women are still stage-hands, and objectification is hard currency.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This is what Facebook is about, and ultimately what capitalist realism is about: life as reducible to one giant hot-or-not contest, with adverts.
  • There is a certain type of nerd entitlement that is all too easily co-opted into a modern mythology of ruthless capitalist exploitation, in which the acquisition of wealth and status at all costs is phrased as a cheeky way of getting one's own back on those kids who were mean to you at school.
  • The protagonist is invariably white and rich and always male -- Hollywood cannot countenance female nerds, other than as minor characters who transform into pliant sexbots as soon as they remove their glasses -- but these privileges are as naught compared to the injustice life has served him by making him shy, spotty and interested in Star Trek. He has been wronged, and he has every right to use his l33t skills to bend the engine of humanity to his purpose.
  • For me, being a geek is about community, energy and celebration of difference -- but in the sterile fairytale of contemporary capitalism, successful geekery is about the rewards of power and the usefulness of commodifying other humans as a sum of likes, interests and saleable personal data.
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "The Social Network is an elegant psychodrama of contemporary economics. " By Laurie Penny at New Statesman on October 1, 2010. Referred to by Nicholas Schiller.
anonymous

Are the WikiLeaks Actually An American Plot? - 0 views

nationalinterest.org/4487

privacy politics

shared by anonymous on 29 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 29 Nov 10
     
    "The Obama administration is busily denouncing the WikiLeaks. Spilling secrets is a bad thing, we're told, for American national security. Relations with friendly leaders will be jeopardized. And so on. But is it true? Or are the leaks, in fact, part of a carefully orchestrated plot by the American government?" By Jacob Heilbrunn at The National Interest Blog on November 29, 2010.
anonymous

What I've learned from Less Wrong - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...at_ive_learned_from_less_wrong

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 20 Nov 10 - Cached
  • It’s much easier to be egalitarian and respect everyone when you can always say ”Well, I suppose that might be right -- you never know!“
  • in a desire to be exceptional, I naïvely reasoned that believing similar things to other smart people would probably get me the same boring life outcomes that many of them seemed to be getting
  • it no longer makes sense to be a meme collecting, universal egalitarian the same way I was before
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This is because induction is the only way to reliably find candidate hypotheses which deserve attention.
  • Not only is the free will problem solved, but it turns out it was easy. 
  • philosophers failing to uniformly mark this as ”settled“ and move on is not because this is a questionable result... they’re just in a world where most philosophers are still having trouble figuring out if god exists or not.
  • anonymous on 20 Nov 10
     
    "I've been compiling a list of the top things I've learned from Less Wrong in the past few months. If you're new here or haven't been here since the beginning of this blog, perhaps my personal experience from reading the back-log of articles known as the sequences can introduce you to some of the more useful insights you might get from reading and using Less Wrong."
anonymous

Paleo-Future - Paleo-Future Blog - Driverless Car of the Future (1957) - 0 views

www.paleofuture.com/...ss-car-of-the-future-1957.html

technology predictions

shared by anonymous on 10 Dec 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Dec 10
     
    "TVs that hang on walls? Automatic lights? Food cooked in seconds? American power companies sure had the future figured out! Except for one little thing... we're still waiting on those driverless cars. The futuristic family from this ad bares a striking resemblance to the family of Disneyland TV's 1958 episode, "Magic Highway, USA." ELECTRICITY MAY BE THE DRIVER. One day your car may speed along an electric super-highway, its speed and steering automatically controlled by electronic devices embedded in the road. Highways will be made safe -- by electricity! No traffic jam.. no collisions... no driver fatigue."
anonymous

Stepping off the narrow path of reality - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...off-the-narrow-path-of-reality

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 10 - Cached
  • You might think that believing in Santa Claus is a lot sillier than believing in homeopathy, but really they’re the same: they’re both fantasy.
  • For support in this thesis of mine, I present to you an article in the New York Times about how politicians who attack evolution legislatively are now also attacking global warming.
  • But the other reason I’m not surprised is that, over the past decade or so in particular, we’ve seen the far right promote fantasy over reality. Abstinence-only education, creationism, global warming denialism, defunding stem cell research, the mocking of volcano research, fruit fly research, planetarium star projectors.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It shows to me that once you buy into one flavor of candy-coated nonsense, they all start to taste pretty good.
anonymous

Scientists as "spiritual atheists" - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...ientists-as-spiritual-atheists

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 10 - Cached
  • He’s referring to a new book, Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think by Elaine Howard Ecklund.
  • The reference point is the general population. In fact, 72% of scientists hold to a non-theistic position. On the other hand, most are not militant atheists in the mould of Richard Dawkins or Peter Atkins.
  • For the general public religious truths are both descriptive and prescriptive. That is, they describe the world’s past, and its present, as a factual matter, and, they prescribe a set of actions and norms. I think most scientists are thinking in prescriptive terms here, not descriptive. In other words, the religions of the world have integrated within their belief systems basic core human morality and ethics. Fundamental moral truths. I would myself agree that there are basic truths in many religions.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 10
     
    Are Top Scientists Really So Atheistic? Look at the Data asks Chris Mooney. By Razib Khan in Discover Magazine Blogs on April 14, 2010.
anonymous

Mat of microbes the size of Greece discovered on seafloor - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...post.cfm

layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 10 - Cached
  • A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000 microbes, can actually hold more than one billion microorganisms, the census scientists reported.
  • the mighty microbes, which constitute 50 to 90 percent of the oceans' total biomass, according to newly released data.
  • This genetic data has revealed that there might be as many as 100 times more microbe genera than researchers had assumed. One study conducted in the English Channel landed 7,000 new genera alone. Current estimates place the number of marine microbial species at about a billion, according to a prepared statement by John Baross of the University of Washington and chair of the International Census of Marine Microbes's scientific advisory council.
  • anonymous on 19 Apr 10
     
    By Katherine Harmon at Scientific American on April 18, 2010. More indicators of the massive role that largely-invisible microorganisms have in Earth's biosphere.
anonymous

Death of the American Century | Lifecourse Blog - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...death-of-the-american-century

generations silent genx

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • This view that Allen describes, of America as history’s existential good guy, is very linked to the psyche of his  Silent (born 1925-1942).
  • In any event,  Generation X (born 1961-1981) seems entirely unmoved by the emotional tensions and turmoil that Allen describes.
  • It’s fascinating, in retrospect, that the Silent interpreted the warmth with which a war-devastated world regarded Goliath America just after WWII as genuine affection, as opposed to transient gratitude triggered by necessity. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Back in the 1990s, Allen interviewed me at length about a feature story he was doing (it was later published in the WP) on how people of different ages react to that old Warner Brothers cartoon about Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote.  In a talk he was giving at a local college, he discovered by accident that all of the (Xer) students sympathized with the coyote, not the roadrunner.  He was flabbergasted, because for as long as he could remember, he and his peers had always rooted for the roadrunner.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 10
     
    By Neil Howe at Lifecourse on April 30, 2010. A generational look at the changing assumptions of America's ascendancy.
anonymous

Eight Thoughts About Timescale - 0 views

www.warrensenders.com/journal

longnow

shared by anonymous on 04 May 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 04 May 10
     
    By Warren Sender at Running Gamak: Warren Senders' Blog on May 3, 2010.
anonymous

Generational Battle Brews Over Gilded Baby-Boom Pensions | GOVERNING - 0 views

www.governing.com/...over-gilded-baby-boom-pensions

generations

shared by anonymous on 03 May 10 - Cached
  • • "As a Gen-X'er, I have heard the same things since I entered the workforce: 1) You will make less than those who came before you. 2) Your benefit package will be less robust than those who came before you. 3) You will pay more for your lower-quality benefit package. 4) You will be required to work harder on more complex tasks than those who came before you."
  • In many cases, the most viable way to achieve intergenerational equity will be to bill incumbent workers for a higher share of their retirement benefits. To some, that will feel like a pay cut, but if elder workers' benefits are untouchable, then heftier payroll deductions may be the only option left.
  • anonymous on 03 May 10
     
    By Girard Miller in Governing on October 8, 2009. Referenced by Neil Howe (http://blog.lifecourse.com/2010/05/generational-equity/)
anonymous

Scientists say paper battery could be in the works - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...idUSTRE5B642U20091207

technology longnow

shared by anonymous on 03 May 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 03 May 10
     
    By Jackie Frank at Reuters on December 7, 2009.
  • anonymous on 03 May 10
anonymous

Bill Gates Funds Seawater Cloud Seeding, "the Most Benign Form of Geoengineering" - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...-spray-seawater-to-seed-clouds

layscience technology sustainability

shared by anonymous on 13 May 10 - Cached
  • a fleet of 1,900 ships costing £5 billion (about $7.5 billion) could arrest the rise in temperature by criss-crossing the oceans and spraying seawater from tall funnels to whiten clouds and increase their reflectivity [The Times].
  • Armand Neukermanns, who is leading the research, said that whitening clouds was “the most benign form of engineering” because, while it might alter rainfall, the effects would cease soon after the machines were switched off [The Times]
  • the billionaire former head of Microsoft announced he’s give nearly $5 million of his fortune to fund research into geoengineering projects.
  • anonymous on 13 May 10
     
    By Andrew Moseman under 80beats at Discover Magazine.
anonymous

Enter the nano-spiders - independent walking robots made of DNA - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...ent-walking-robots-made-of-dna

layscience technology

shared by anonymous on 13 May 10 - Cached
  • Two spiders are walking along a track – a seemingly ordinary scene, but these are no ordinary spiders. They are molecular robots and they, like the tracks they stride over, are fashioned from DNA. One of them has four legs and marches over its DNA landscape, turning and stopping with no controls from its human creators. The other has four legs and three arms – it walks along a miniature assembly line, picking up three pieces of cargo from loading machines (also made of DNA) and attaching them to itself. All of this is happening at the nanometre scale, far beyond what the naked eye can discern. Welcome to the exciting future of nanotechnology.
  • anonymous on 13 May 10
     
    By Ed Yong under "Not Exactly Rocket Science" at Discover Magazine on May 12, 2010.
anonymous

Believers Responding to Doubt | Godless Girl - 0 views

www.godlessgirl.com/...believers-responding-to-doubt

religion

shared by anonymous on 21 Jan 11 - Cached
  • A 2009 study in Britain found that non-religious parents have a near 100 percent chance of passing on their views to their children, whereas religious parents have only about a 50 / 50 chance of passing on their views.
  • anonymous on 21 Jan 11
     
    "A little while ago I stumbled on a blog post about how some Christians tend respond to the doubts of their fellow believers and how that may actually be pushing doubters away."
anonymous

Two Thumbs, Two Dimensions - 0 views

www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx

media

shared by anonymous on 25 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • According to Ebert, the 3-D effect brings in an "artificial" third dimension, which doesn't serve to make a movie any more realistic. In fact, he says, it makes an image seem less real, since under normal circumstances "we do not perceive parts of our vision dislodging themselves from the rest and leaping at us." Here he appears to be confusing cheesy, pop-out effects (which are used judiciously in the better—and more recent—films) with the medium as a whole. Yes, some 3-D movies do contain these gimmicks, but others do not.
  • anonymous on 25 Jan 11
     
    "As far as Roger Ebert is concerned, the discussion about 3-D is over. "The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous," he wrote in his blog Sunday. "The case is closed." If that means Ebert will stop complaining about the medium, so much the better. For years now, the venerable critic has been griping that 3-D cinema is dim, distracting, and useless. And I mean for years: Even at the age of 10, young Ebert turned up his nose at Arch Oboler's stereo jungle adventure, Bwana Devil. (Deeply unmoved, was he, by the hails of spears.) That was back in 1952; more than a half-century later, he's still shaking his fist at the silver screen-I hate 3-D and you should, too! Professional obligations notwithstanding, Ebert doesn't want to see another movie in three dimensions. Ever."
anonymous

Is crime a virus or a beast? How metaphors shape our thoughts and decisions - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...ape-our-thoughts-and-decisions

shared by anonymous on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • As with all complex issues, crime is suffused with metaphors.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Feb 11
       
      This is oddly understandable, and not hard for me to mentally extrapolate further: that our politics is swayed by our characterization of events.
  • In a series of five experiments, Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky from Stanford University have shown how influential metaphors can be.
  • First, Thibodeau and Boroditsky asked 1,482 students to read one of two reports about crime in the City of Addison.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The second report was exactly the same, except it described crime as a “virus infecting the city” and “plaguing” neighbourhoods.
  • After reading these words, 75% of the students put forward solutions that involved enforcement or punishment
  • After reading this version, only 56% opted for more enforcement, while 44% suggested social reforms.
  • But these words have no weight on their own; it’s their context that gives them power.
  • If the critical sentence came at the end of the report, it didn’t have any effect.
  • As you might expect, men and Republicans were more likely to emphasise enforcement, while women and Democrats leant towards social reforms. But these factors only created differences of around 8 to 9 percentage points. The metaphors, on the other hand, created shifts of between 18 to 22 percentage points!
  • I agree with Richard Dawkins that DNA is a recipe more than a blueprint
  • anonymous on 24 Feb 11
     
    In 1990, in a depressed area of Buffalo, New York, eleven schoolgirls were raped. According to George Kelling, a criminal justice scholar, eight of these incidents could have been prevented. After the third case, police knew that a serial rapist was on the loose but, even though they had a description and modus operandi, they issued no warning to local parents. They saw their job as catching the criminal rather than preventing more girls from being raped. Kelling argued that the cops hadn't wilfully neglected their duties. Their actions were swayed by their views of police-work, which were in turn affected by metaphors. They saw themselves as crime-fighters who trod the "thin blue line" protecting innocent civilians from criminal marauders. With this role entrenched in their minds, they saw their job as catching the rapist, even at the expense of preventing further crimes. As Kelling said, the eight Buffalo schoolgirls "were victims, though no one realized it at the time, not only of a rapist, but of a metaphor."
anonymous

There was scale and structure before history - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...e-and-structure-before-history

layscience

shared by anonymous on 17 May 11 - Cached
  • even if genetics is not determinate or even fundamentally specially insightful, it will at least sharpen the discussions, and move scholars away from arguments of rhetorical excess.
  • The “demic diffusion” model to some extent seems to play into this, where simple demographic population growth due to the ability of farmers to extract more calories per unit of land allowed them to “swamp” the hunter-gatherers.
  • the major problem with these models is that they downplay by understandable omission the higher order social complexity of institutions and identities which characterize humans.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The Inca for example did not have full elaborated literacy, and yet had political dominion and cultural hegemony from Ecuador to central Chile.
  • the genetic references are thin and somewhat outdated
  • I think the genetics is now making a stronger case for disruption, confusion, and replacement, than is acknowledged in this article.
  • we must look to punctuation of cultural and demographic change as the norm, rather than the exception. The old diffusion models may be predicated on a level of smoothness and gradualism in historical and social process which are simply not feasible.
  • The long pause of agriculture on the north European plain was partly probably the structural constraint because of the poor fit between southern crops and northern climes. But once a sufficient fit was operative did that naturally result in the rapid sweep of farmers north? Perhaps not.
  • anonymous on 17 May 11
     
    "Until relatively recently the spread of agriculture in Europe, and to some extent the whole world, was pigeon-holed into two maximalist models: cultural or demographic diffusionist. Neither of these models were maximalist in that they denied the impact of culture or demographics in totality, but they tended to be rhetorically brandished in a manner where it was clear which dynamic was the dominant mode of explaining the nature of cultural and genetic variation and their origins."
anonymous

Unemployment and jobs: Work for post-materialists - 4 views

www.economist.com/...unemployment-and-jobs

economics post-materialist

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 11 - Cached
  • I think Mr Yglesias' proposal that the Fed target a 3-4% rate of inflation is indeed the single best thing Washington can do to create jobs today.
  • there's something that bothers me slightly about this whole "job creation" discussion. The implicit idea seems to be that policy should aim to increase employer demand for employees. But it occurs to me that perhaps some of the long-term unemployed want remunerative work, but are a bit sick of "employment".
  • Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure
  • This is me. I don't want to maximise income. I want to maximise autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work. Reihan Salam has written provocatively on the subject of threshold earners, in addition to introducing me to David Roberts' related idea of "the medium chill".
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 20 Jul 11
       
      Word up. There are too many things I want to do that cost me money--or at least don't pay me.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Jul 11
       
      This resonated with me, as well. I am actually pretty good at doing things that are completely tertiary to my job. I've been focused on turning my full-time job into that, but what I'd really like is some way to bounce from project to project, doing what I'm good at, getting some fulfillment, and getting something back from it. I feel like all these little internet-networks hold the potential for that, but - as the article points out - it's not as though you can get by that way.
  • as Ronald Inglehart has documented, the achievement of high levels of widespread material well-being has precipitated a momentous shift toward "post-materialist" values across the entire developed world.
  • Having secured a relatively comfortable standard of living, we have come to worry less about the stuff we need to get by and more about the pursuit of self-realisation, meaning in life, justice in society, and harmony with the natural world.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 20 Jul 11
       
      I think this is part of the "we're slipping into European economic views" thing.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Jul 11
       
      Speaking for my wife and I, we feel like our material focus isn't on keeping up with the joneses, but doing stuff that makes enjoy our days just a little bit more.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 21 Jul 11
       
      Unamerican! ;)
  • Whatever our level of education, if unemployment benefits and odd jobs add up to enough to keep us above a socially acceptable material threshold, we will not be in a hurry to accept any available employment, no matter how unpleasant or unsuitable.  
  • So, yeah, I'd like to see wage subsidies and a 4% inflation target. But I'd also like to see a shift away from economic policy that pushes us so insistently into the "employee" role. What does the government call you if you are working but not on somebody's payroll with social security and Medicare taxes automatically deducted from your wages? Self-employed!
  • You must work for somebody, even if it's yourself.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 20 Jul 11
       
      "Gotta Serve Somebody" is on my morning playlist. Dylan brings the truth.
  • But I don't want to be a tiny business that hires me. I don't want to be my own boss. I don't want to be a boss at all, or to have one. I just want to work and get paid for it, on terms agreeable to the parties involved.
  • Clearly, decoupling health benefits from employment would help a lot. Less obviously, but at least as importantly, we need to eliminate the insane patchwork of regulations that keep folks from legally cutting hair for money in a kitchen, or legally making a few bucks every now and then taxiing people around town in a 1988 Ford Escort. De-formalising and de-bureaucratising labour certainly makes it harder for government to track who has paid what to whom, who owes how much in various taxes, and so forth. But it would be truly pathetic if the legal/economic organisation of our society was optimised for government surveillance and tax collection and not for the exercise of autonomy in pursuit of a meaningful life.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 20 Jul 11
       
      ... Maybe. The fact of the matter is that group insurance rates through employers tend to be much more affordable than getting individual coverage. There's a reason so many hipsters and art types work part-time at Starbucks and other shops that offer benefits to part-time workers. Just as there's a reason for regulation beyond just tracking how money moves. We don't just certify drugs or beef because we want to make sure we know what people are spending money on at the supermarket.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Jul 11
       
      Quite true. Will's a bit too anti-regulatory for my taste. To expand your observation: if we let the free market do its thing, it does not logically follow that all our food will be safer, absent a regulatory apparatus. In fact, my hazy recollection is that the mix of regional laws and patchwork of safety requirements is one reason that some industries _crave_ regulation, so they can do business without quadrupling the size of their legal department.
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 11
     
    "The Atlantic, with the support of McKinsey & Company, has put together a forum on the question: 'What's the single best thing Washington can do to jump-start job creation?'"
anonymous

My Commodore Revival - 0 views

comm64.blogspot.com

commodore videogames gaming amiga c64

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Aug 11
     
    This is a great blog by an old Commodore/Amiga fan (like myself) wherein he tries to rekindle the love. He posts quick, breezy items. The blog's more of a public notebook where he shares impressions along the way.
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