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thinkahol *

9/11: A Conspiracy Theory - YouTube - 0 views

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    Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.
thinkahol *

A Primer on Class Struggle | Common Dreams - 0 views

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    When we study Marx in my graduate social theory course, it never fails that at least one student will say (approximately), "Class struggle didn't escalate in the way Marx expected. In modern capitalist societies class struggle has disappeared. So isn't it clear that Marx was wrong and his ideas are of little value today?" I respond by challenging the premise that class struggle has disappeared. On the contrary, I say that class struggle is going on all the time in every major institution of society. One just has to learn how to recognize it. One needn't embrace the labor theory of value to understand that employers try to increase profits by keeping wages down and getting as much work as possible out of their employees. As the saying goes, every successful capitalist knows what a Marxist knows; they just apply the knowledge differently. Workers' desire for better pay and benefits, safe working conditions, and control over their own time puts them at odds with employers. Class struggle in this sense hasn't gone away. In fact, it's inherent in the relationship between capitalist employer and employee. What varies is how aggressively and overtly each side fights for its interests.
thinkahol *

Video - Douglas Rushkoff on Why Jobs Are Obsolete - WSJ.com - 0 views

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    All the fixation on creating jobs in America is outdated and misguided, argues media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff. He explains to WSJ's Dennis Berman his theory on new models that could actually increase productivity and make Americans more satisfied.
thinkahol *

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Bruce Fein, American Empire Before the Fall | Book Salon - 0 views

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    There's no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles. Yet paradoxically, Fein has been, and remains, one of the most eloquent and incisive political voices over the last decade. He was one of the earliest and most emphatic critics of Bush and Cheney's radical abuses of executive power. Two weeks after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005, that Bush had ordered the NSA to illegally eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by law, Fein used his column in the right-wing Washington Times to warn that "Mr. Bush has adamantly refused to acknowledge any constitutional limitations on his power to wage war indefinitely"; to scorn as "war powers nonsense" the theories assembled "to defend Mr.
thinkahol *

Petition: End Limited Liability (and Save the World) | Change.org - 0 views

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    Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Socialist, politically active and not we are reaping the bitter reward of a political and legal system designed to maximize corporate profits at the expense of our environment, our livelihood, and our very lives. Our society is unraveling. We all know this. This is not idle conspiracy theory. These are well established facts. We are ruled by a headless beast that is no longer accountable to us. That it is headless makes it no less beastly. But there is a silver bullet. It's within our power to restore a functioning free market; to take back our democracy. We must end limited liability for corporations. Only when wealthy investors are no longer shielded from the costs that we collectively bear in their stead, only when they can no longer hide from the burden they have placed on us, only then can we expect the end of corporate plunder.   We are running out of time. Millions of Germans lost faith in the free market and capitalism during the Great Depression, and "with the failure of the left to provide a viable alternative, they became vulnerable to the rhetoric of a party that, once it came to power, combined Keynesian pump-priming measures that brought unemployment down to 3 percent with a devastating counterrevolutionary social and cultural program."
thinkahol *

The Money Party - The Essence of our Political Troubles | The Economic Populist - 0 views

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    The Money Party is a small group of enterprises and individuals who have most of the money in this country. They use that money to make more money. Controlling who gets elected to public office is the key to more money for them and less for us. As 2008 approaches, The Money Party is working hard to maintain its perfect record. It is not about Republicans versus Democrats. Right now, the Republicans do a better job taking money than the Democrats. But The Money Party is an equal opportunity employer. They have no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests. Democrats are as welcome as Republicans to this party. It's all good when you're on the take and the take is legal. This is not a conspiracy theory. There are no secret societies or sinister operators. This party is up front and in your face. Just follow the money. One percent of Americans hold 33% of the nation's wealth. The top 10% hold 72% of the total wealth. The bottom 40% of Americans control only 0.3% (three tenths of one percent). And that was before "pay day loans."
Johann Höchtl

Hacker News | Facebook is not worth $33 billion - 0 views

  • The whole section "Minority investment evaluations aren’t real" is so economically bizarre and incorrect that I don't even know where to start. It's like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is incorrect to refer to a 5' tall boy as 5' tall because he's often sitting down. Every single day every single public company in the world is valued by the last share traded, usually for a tiny fraction of the company.Finally, to the main point. Facebook has certainly figured out how to make money off of 500,000,000 users. And as they optimize, they will make a lot more money. When they figure out how to make another DIME off of every user, they will instantly be making another $50,000,000 a year... in pure profit. How much profit will 37signals make if you figure out how to make another dime off of every customer? Eh David? Facebook works on the theory that when you have a lot of people, you don't have to make as much per person, because the amount of money you make is the number of customers times the amount of money you make off of each one. Again, that pesky multiplication.
  • The bond and equity markets are based on sound regulation, transparency, and quarterly statements. Facebook has none of those things when it operates in the dark of the secondary markets.
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    Lenghty read Spolsky vs. dhh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky about the valuation of Facebook and SNS
Johann Höchtl

Wiki:Government 2.0 | Social Media CoLab - 0 views

  • Internal (intra or inter-government) collaboration. Institutional presence on external social networks Open government data Employees on external social networks 
  • Increased government efficiency Increased government accountability Increased citizen engagement and participation Increased innovation
  • Potential loss of privacy Invalid data
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  • 1) what data should the government share and 2) how does data influence the public sphere
  • The optimists decry the modern instantiations of bureaucracy and policy in which democratic governments operate as the source of democratic ills and support the normative idea of an informed and engaged public.  Pessimists counter that the normative model of democracy most accepted in the literature is a novel construction that is not grounded in the natural behavior of citizens.
  • The innocence of Americans is either explained as a rational choice under the principle of rational ignorance (Downs, 1957) or explained as something inherent in the lack of mental sophistication in humans.
  • Government 2.0 attempts to correct the problems of information diffusion by assuming that people are simply unable or unwilling to find information in the offline world.  If the barriers to information acquisition are lowered then, the theory goes, people will be more likely to find, synthesize and use information in decision-making processes.
  • Feedback loops: Who will be active in these loops? How will the public respond? 
  • People usually think about explicit citizen participation, but some of the most pwrful Web 2.0 tools aren't about that: it's about ppl who are participating w/o knowing they are participating. Google is actually one of the great engines of harnessing participation, anyone who clicks on a link is participating, a link is a vote, meaning hidden in something they're doing already. Wikipedia isn't the only place where people are contributing.
  • The amount of data being shared/collected about people is growing exponentially, old notions of privacy need to be replaed by ideas of visibility and control: give more control over who gets to see it. We are better off with more visibility and control than stopping people from collecting data. The data is incredibly useful, applicaitons depend on data, people willingly giving up that privacy about where they are all the time.
  • many programs go wrong, generically, (what worries me) government is still very much an insider's game, we have not yet really built a system that allows real participation
  • Another gov 2.0 observation: it's very hard for a government agency to start over, it's not like private sector, where companies with bad ideas go out of business. Government agencies don't go out of business. (consumers benefit from newspapers going out of business) We don't have creative destruction in gov't, the basic machinery of it just gets bigger and more entrenched. Need to figure out how to start over: what not to do
  • The toughest part about Web 2.0, Gov 2.0, etc, might be the role of management. It used to be about defining the outcome and monitoring the progress towards that outcome. In Web 2.0 you don't know what that outcome is, it's a huge leap of faith, and takes a tremendous amount of adjusting to that approach. Do we need a different set of metrics? Yes. Media is intersecting with technology, technology is a new channel for media, even Hollywood is changing: oh my goodness, we have to create entirely new financial models!
  • "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." It's a cultural issue here, people are stuck in the past and we need a new wave of innovators or we should just expect slow results.
Parycek

Willkommen im Schwarm! - 0 views

  • Mit dem Schwarmverhalten von Bienen, Ameisen, Fischen und Vögeln hat die Sache allerdings nicht immer viel zu tun. Und auch, dass Menschen, über große Entfernungen hinweg, selbstorganisiert und ohne zentrale Lenkung miteinander kooperieren, ist kein ganz neues Phänomen. Der Mechanismus der Preisbildung auf Märkten, wie ihn Adam Smith mit seiner Theorie der "Unsichtbaren Hand" beschrieb, ist das Paradebeispiel für eine solche Form kollektiver Intelligenz.
  • Smart Crowd: Der Durchschnitt macht's
  • Geschichte der Soziologin Kate Gordon. Sie führt, noch in den zwanziger Jahren, ein einfaches Experiment durch. Gordon bittet ihre Studenten, eine Handvoll Gegenstände nach dem geschätzten Gewicht in einer Reihe anzuordnen. Zweihundert Kandidaten lässt sie diesen Test absolvieren. Am Ende zählt sie zusammen, ermittelt den Durchschnitt der Schätzwerte. Und da ist es passiert. Zusammengenommen hat die Gruppe der zweihundert Studenten eine Trefferquote von 94 Prozent.
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  • Nur fünf Teilnehmer der Studie erzielen mit ihren eigenen Schätzungen ein besseres Ergebnis. Der Durchschnitt hat die Einzelnen besiegt!
  • Andere Forscher wiederholen das Experiment. Sie variieren den Aufbau, lassen anstelle von Gewicht die Menge von Murmeln in einem Glas schätzen oder die Anzahl von Schrotkörnchen, die zu einem kleinen Häuflein aufgeschüttet worden sind
  • Ein schlichtes mathematisches Gesetz ist der Grund für den überraschenden Ausgang der Experimente. Das "Prinzip des Durchschnitts" könnte man es nennen. In seiner einfachsten Form besagt es: Lass eine Gruppe von Menschen irgendeine Menge, ein Gewicht oder eine andere Zahl schätzen. Berechne den Durchschnitt der Tipps und Schätzungen. Immer wird er mindestens so nahe am Ziel liegen, meist sogar näher wie der durchschnittliche Einzelne - selbst dann, wenn die Gruppe aus nicht mehr als zwei Teilnehmern besteht.
  • "Als Faustregel würde ich sagen: Wenn Dir zwei Leute einen Tipp geben, und Du sicher weißt, dass der eine mindestens doppelt so verlässlich in seinem Urteil ist, wie der andere, dann tu was er sagt. Ansonsten: Bilde den Durchschnitt!". Jack Soll
  • Sunstein zitiert, ist ein Experiment, das 2005 in Colorado durchgeführt wurde. Sechzig amerikanische Bürger wurden zusammengebracht und in zehn Gruppen zu jeweils fünf bis sieben Leuten eingeteilt. Jede Gruppe wurde aufgefordert, über aktuelle politische Kontroversen zu diskutieren: Homo-Ehe, Gleichstellungspolitik, Kyoto-Protokoll. Die Teilnehmer des Experimentes waren so ausgesucht worden, dass die Gruppen zu Teilen aus Liberalen, also Linken bestand, und zu Teilen aus Konservativen. Fünf Gruppen waren von den Liberalen dominiert, fünf von den Konservativen. Jeweils vor und nach der Diskussion gaben die Teilnehmer ihre Meinungen einzeln und anonym zu Protokoll.
  • Das Resultat: In fast jeder Gruppe vertraten die Diskutanten am Ende radikalere Positionen als zuvor. Während innerhalb der jeweiligen Lager der Zusammenhalt gestärkt wurde, wuchs die Kluft zwischen Liberalen und Konservativen.
  • Denn eine Grundvoraussetzung für die beschriebenen Techniken des "information aggregeting" ist, dass die einzelnen Teilnehmer, Spieler oder Wähler hinreichend voneinander isoliert sind und sich in ihrer Meinungsbildung nicht, wie im Colorado-Experiment, zu stark gegenseitig beeinflussen.
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    Alter (2006) aber ausgezeichneter Artikel zum Thema Kollektive Intelligenz - Potentiale und Grenzen. Mit einigen sehr guten Beispielen.
Parycek

Obama's open government initiative failing in a big way - 2 views

  • open government initiative sounds good in theory, the statute is still too vague:
  • problem is a loophole in the Open Government Directive itself. By asking agencies to only inventory their “high-value” data it gave them an instant out for just about anything.
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