That's curious, my need for instantaneous news has been waning. This past few weeks events (local and international) have really been the proverbial straw.
I now wait. For news, I want truth not action.
152 karma · joined February 14, 2010
I now wait. For news, I want truth not action.
Second, the argument about GMO (or any other high-tech way to increase farming yields) being a 'solution' to food supply shortages is thrown around a lot without any evidence.. nor, as far as I can see, any actual basis in fact.
The drive to increase yields is a drive to increase profit / hectare, which has only resulted in actually driving other farmers out of the business which reduces food production stability, and ultimately overall yield. In every objective measure, this process also produces inferior product.
Monsanto has been profiting from the large-scale destruction of many decades of careful seed adaptation in regional areas. They have driven seed sellers and savers out of business in order to monopolise the markets. They sue / threaten / cajole farmers into using their product or effectively run them out of business.
Third, if I spent billions creating a piece of software whose sole purpose was to replicate its source code and upload it randomly to surrounding networks (along with some by-product) and did this by only changing a couple of lines in an existing piece of open source code, so that no one could really tell the difference... and got pissed that people were using that code. Well, I would just be a bit of a dick now, wouldn't I.
Spending more money on something does not give you any more rights, just more risk.
WRT Australian voting, in 2010 the voter turnout was around 92/93%, with a further 5.5% informal (donkey). Around 20% of the electorate voted for the minor parties / independents.
All this translated to.. 90% of the seats to the two major parties. Nope, no corruption here. In a very real sense the system is designed by the parties that run it. I mean, we all remember what happened in Tassie in the late 90's?
2. People agree with corporations because corporations frame the question, the debate and the answer. Same thing happens here in oz, where murdoch owns 70% of the papers. People are so content with their gov in the US that they vote in ever increasing numbers?
People don't care and are not engaged by politics because they are taught from a very young age to accept that they can have no effect on the system. You can choose between tweedledum or tweedledee (or kang and kodos, if you prefer). This was lessig's point. Money has corrupted the process before you even get to a choice.
"More regulation or less regulation?" People are always going to disagree over process. Especially if you frame it in such oversimplified terms. Regulation on disallowing a company to pump cyanide* into the water supply? Find someone who disagrees with this!
*and no, this is not hyperbole, just lack of regulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Baia_Mare_cyanide_spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_Environmental_Disaster
(the situation, not the reaction.. I would have asked him to leave (and have in similar situations), though I realise not everyone is as comfortable as with confrontation as I ;)
I would encourage people to name names in these situations. Group humiliation is a very good catalyst for change, if it comes to that.
This is a very positive way of looking at this. I would argue that we have a fairly good sense of how much more (a lot) and that this informs the tendency for entrenched meritocracies to restrict access rather than open the floodgates, so to speak. People are generally overprotective of their position or status, the past and what they have built for themselves.
I wholly agree that "communities can thrive", and I believe gain a lot more, by being open and welcoming to people not (just) on the basis of merit, but on the basis of curiosity / interest / engagement.
I get the feeling though that the issue with RSS was not altogether an issue of uptake or ux.. but more an issue of sites wanting to track their users. If RSS could allow for some sort of phone home (opt out / anonymisable of course) then maybe there might be more of a push from content creators.
And for every person who made a bit of money from it, there was another who ended up having to sell back to the council for a reduced amount when they started knocking these things down in the 2000's.
A master of his art has the time to design not just his solution, but the task itself, and the experience to understand all the implications of a given solution.
If you view your employer as a master who gets to tell you how and where and when to work, for the pittance he affords you so you can live to work another day, and so he can take all your extra productivity and initiative and IP and profit from it as he wishes, then I guess you are right.
If you view your contract with your employer as a mutual agreement where you provide a set amount of work for a set amount of money, then your productivity is your own. You can use it for a better life or more money.
I guess this is why I contract. I happen to think my pay should be directly linked to the value I create, rather than an arbitrary amount based on how much it costs me to live, and how long it takes me to find work.
Though in this case I think maybe there is a third option.. ignorance maybe?
I am in the bad habit of reading HN on my old phone (CM7). The comments load much quicker than the articles, and sometimes they lead me astray.
LLC is limits liability doesn't it? Its not no liability. Surely a more effective and wide ranging measure would be to enforce limits on the limitations. If no one wants to take some small amount of responsibility for a company, that company has no business existing.
Productivity is usually a relative measure to gauge the profit margin of a nation / company ie. hours worked against earnings. But as you say, a relative measure will not catch any across the board increase.
The corollary of this is that almost the entirety of the worth is ascribed to the comparatively minor differences which produce relative gains. Anything which does not produce relative gains, but which 'simply' helps the human race at large is ignored or disparaged by the market. ie. if it don't make dollars, it don't make sense.
While I can kind of see the thinking behind your argument about the rise of the financial sector being driven by demands of growth from politics and policies.. i think this is very much the wrong way of looking at it. The rise of the financial sector was a power grab.. a con, pure and simple. They bought up all our debt, devalued it and then sold us more. That is to say, they bought all our shares in the future and with a bit of hocus-pocus, pulled a bunch more out of thin air and diluted our stake.
(for those situations when a conspiracy might be necessary)
You can't just count the cost of one suit against one settlement and call it economically rational.
Another way to look at this is that the exception proves the rule. These sorts of deliberately perverse inversions of discrimination really offend. Perhaps they may also serve spur the male colleagues to clean their own house. Sometimes people can become aware of their own biases when they see their actions mirrored in front of them.
As an aside, I will believe the people arguing for deontological ethics just as soon as they give up the lifetime of power, privilege and status afforded them due to their sex (or race).
Most employee's do not know, nor know how to find out, their net worth to the company. They definitely do not get offered equity.
Most companies go to some lengths to obfuscate the earnings from their employees and contractually forbid their employees from speaking about their own earnings. Most employees, even if armed with such knowledge, do not have the power to demand their worth as there are a large queue of eager replacements for their position.
My point was essentially, if someone thinks they are trading off rewards / equity / ip royalties etc for job security, they probably do not have a good understanding of their relationship or value to their employer.
Don seems to have known full well what he was trading off, and as he explained when he drew the line and exercised his right to negotiate "they simply refused to actually ask permission". They refused to negotiate as they were so used to being in a position of power.
"But you've got to have enough skill to be of value" I would say, you have to have enough skill to be of 'great' value.. then you have the power to negotiate or go elsewhere. If you do.. more power to you!
It is (usually) an exploitative relationship, most just don't know it. The fact that this arrangement is the norm speaks only of the power differential and nothing of fairness. Could you imagine what would happen to management if employees got a fair share of the work they produced.. for that matter, how much of Don's profits came from his hand and how much from the advertisers and how much from Disney's distribution network? Why are advertisers paid so much and box packers paid so little?
The fact that so many of us accept this system is because we don't have the power to demand profits (or we don't know any better) and we need to eat. We just tell ourselves that we prefer to earn a little less so we don't have to worry about risk. It makes it easier to sleep at night.
It seems to me to be one of the central aspects to design, of any persuasion. It is a deliberate, thoughtful act which requires understanding rather than 'just' knowledge. It is a process of questioning and revision rather than merely production. All (good) designers do this.
I think the interesting idea in this article is actually it's corollary. Good knowledge workers ARE actually bad at 'just' working. They think to much, they spend too much time on things that give diminishing returns, they invest in dead ends... they learn. These things are not often valued in the job market.