The Third Wave Is Coming

Buying into the Boom

2012-01-30T11:46:00.000-08:00

Crises Economics, Roubini

As it became apparent that the crisis was real, many commentators tried to make sense of the disaster. Plenty of people invoked Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of the “black swan” to explain it. Taleb, whose book of that title came out on the eve of the crisis, defined a “black swan event” as a game-changing occurrence that is both extraordinarily rare and well-nigh impossible to predict. By that definition, the financial crisis was a freak event, albeit an incredibly important and transformational one. No one could possibly have seen it coming.

In a perverse way, that idea is comforting. If financial crises are black swans, comparable to plane crashes—horrific but highly improbable and impossible to predict—there’s no point in worrying about them. But the recent disaster was no freak event. It was probable. It was even predictable, because financial crises generally follow the same script over and over again. Familiar economic and financial vulnerabilities build up and eventually reach a tipping point. For all the chaos they create, crises are creatures of habit. Most crises begin with a bubble, in which the price of a particular asset rises far above its underlying fundamental value. This kind of bubble often goes hand in hand with an excessive accumulation of debt, as investors borrow money to buy into the boom.

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What is described above is a big problem, because money = debt, and debt is "hoped" to represent new enterprises being formed in which people create value to pay back their debt. If, instead, a pyramid of debt is created that has no basis in terms of creating value, then after the music stops the whole system is in danger of going bust.

Yep

2012-01-28T08:45:00.001-08:00

Asian Population

2012-01-28T03:11:00.001-08:00

We calculated in next 60 years 2 billion people in the world will sadly lose their lives. Since Asia is a continent with a high population density, it is likely that most of the projected death count will come from this continent. Densest countries are the most vulnerable, i.e. in terms of population India has three times more people than US living on a third of her landmass. China is a bit luckier, but overall Asia might witness some hard times.

Under Obama, the Freedom of Information Act is Still in Shackles

2012-01-27T23:18:00.000-08:00

Link

Three years ago this past weekend, on his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued his now infamous memo on transparency and open government, which was supposed to fulfill his campaign promise to lead the “most transparent administration in history.” Instead, his administration has been just as secretive—if not more so—than his predecessors, and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become the prime example of his administration’s lack of progress [..]

[S]ecrecy won out in the Obama administration almost immediately. In the early months of his presidency, a court ruled that the administration would have to turn over photos related to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in response to a FOIA request. Knowing they’d likely lose the appeal, Obama supported a new law that could keep information secret even when FOIA would otherwise require disclosure. The bill’s only intention was to create a way to shield photographs of detainee abuse from public disclosure.

The Faculty Project

2012-01-26T23:15:00.000-08:00

From Udemy.com Email:

As tuition continues to rise, debt increases. We need an education to get the best jobs, feel the most fulfilled, but how can we do that if education is out of reach for most?

It's time for a change. It's time premium education is available to everyone, worldwide. And most importantly, it's time for it to be free.

And so The Faculty Project was born. We were tired of spending tens of thousands of dollars getting an education, so we reached out to the best educators at leading universities and made a bold request: "Share your knowledge and insight not with a classroom, not with a board of academic thinkers, but with the entire world!"

And they did.

Professors jumped at the opportunity to share their passions with interested people everywhere. Economics, Neuroscience, Religion, Medicine, and Brazil... all these and more are now freely accessible. The courses are being created as we speak, and more and more professors are signing up!

But the best part? These courses aren't like your typical free online courses. They're not just recordings of a professor teaching a classroom: they're made specifically for the Faculty Project! These courses are made just for you!

So join us. Join us in sharing ideas with the best minds in the world. Join us in the first ever free and open movement for purely online education. Join us in a revolution that will change the way people think of education. Join us and help us drop the price of top tier education and level the playing field for everyone, worldwide.

Join us at The Faculty Project!

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And it begins...

Teaching yourself mathematics

2012-01-25T09:48:00.000-08:00

Link

Of all the subjects a student is likely to encounter after elementary school, mathematics is by far the easiest to teach yourself. With the appropriate attitude and assumptions, adequate motivation and a simple and easily mastered set of skills the majority of students can take themselves from pre-algebra through calculus [..].

[A]t some point all disciplines require the transition from passive to active and that transition can be challenging. In courses like high school history and science, the emphasis [is] on passively acquiring knowledge [..] By comparison, junior high students playing in an orchestra, writing short stories or solving math problems are almost entirely focused on processes and those processes are essentially the same as those engaged in by professional musicians, writers and mathematicians [..] Unlike music and writing, however, mathematics starts out as a convergent process [.. for any intro level course] say, differential equations, most math problems have only one solution and students are able to quickly and accurately check their work [..].

This unique position of mathematics allows for any number of easy and effective self-study techniques. One of the simplest is the approach that got me through a linear algebra section [ is this ..]

All you need is a textbook and a few sheets of scratch paper. You cover everything below the paragraph you're reading with the sheet of paper. When you get to an example, leave the solution covered and try the problem. After you've finished check your work. If you got it right you continue working your way through the section. If you got it wrong, you have a few choices. If you feel you basically understood the solution and see where you made your mistake, you might simply want to go on; if you're not quite sure about some of the steps in the solution, you should probably go back to the beginning of the section; if you're really lost, you should go back to the preceding section and/or the previous sections that introduced the concepts you're having trouble with.

Once you've worked through all the examples, start on the odd numbered problems and check your answers as you go. If you're feeling confident, you can skip to the difficult problems but if you make a mistake or get stuck you should probably go back to number 1.

University 2.0

2012-01-24T13:30:00.001-08:00

Sebastian Thrun's talk at DLD. He talks about his experiences with the online AI course, and future of university education. Some quotes and the big news at the end:

"There were more students from small countries such as Lithunia than there are students at Stanford".

A student from Afganistan emailed the team, here is an excerpt:

"I spent the last few days under incoming mortar and rocket attacks, then dodging checkpoints under questionable legal status to exfiltrate a war zone to a third world air field until things settle down. I had about an hour of fairly solid internet connectivity to be able to get the assignments done, and still managed a respectable score. This is a typical week here for me".

Another student:

"[Online course] feels more 'intimate' than most of the lectures I attended in the past. I felt that you [..] were personally tutoring me".

Thrun continues: "Having done this [online] course, I cannot teach at Stanford again. It's impossible. I feel like there is a red pill, and blue pill. You can take the blue pill and go back to classroom and lecture your 20 students, but I've taken the red pill, and I've seen the wonderland. We can really change the world with education".

"I gave up tenure at Stanford, and now launching my own platform for online teaching. It is launching today".

The platform is called Udacity.

This is great news.

Making universities obsolete

2012-01-24T13:15:00.000-08:00

Link

Sebastian Thrun [1] recently announced that he was leaving Stanford to found a free, online university called Udacity. This is based on his experiences teaching the famous intro to AI class, for free, to 160,000 students online [..].

In Sebatian's brilliant talk at DLD, he talks about being embarrassed that he was only able to teach a few tens of students at a time, and only to those who can afford $30,000 to attend Stanford. I estimate that I taught fewer than 500 students in total during my eight years on the faculty at Harvard. That's a pretty poor track record by any stretch [..].

Exclusivity is necessary when you only have so much classroom space, or so many dorms, or so many dining halls, so you have to be selective about who enters the hallowed gates of the university. It's also a way of maintaining a brand: even schools, like Harvard, with a "distance education" component go to great lengths to differentiate the "true" Harvard education from a "distance learning certificate," lest they raise the ire of the Old Boys' Network by watering down what it means to get a Harvard degree (not unlike the reaction they got when they started admitting women, way way back in 1977) [..].

Can someone remind me why we still have grades? I like what Sebastian says (quoting Salman Khan) about learning to ride a bicycle: It's not as if you get a D learning to ride a bike, then you stop and move onto learning the unicycle. Shouldn't the goal of every course be to get every student to the point of making an A+?

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[1] Sebastian Thrun is the German professor who is the brain behind Google's self-driving car software.

Bitchin

2012-01-24T01:39:00.001-08:00

After SOPA, PIPA

2012-01-21T23:29:00.000-08:00

Thankfully SOPA, PIPA is stopped, for now. Just to clear things up a bit, the opponents of these bills are not against creators earning what they rightfully deserve. The problem is not the copiers, the problem is the half-baked nature of the system. On one hand it is very easy to share content because of recent technology, on the other hand, it is not easy for content creators to get the rewards (money) they deserve. One part of the system is in 21st century, the other part is on 19th.

Solution? We talked about this idea before; Let's say there is a Web based registry for each artistic creation, and whenever people really like a song, a book, a site, they go to this registry and "like" this work. Or lookup the code for the creation, and send an SMS to a well-known site. Each citizen gets a quota of "like points" each month, day, or year. Unused likes gets carried over to the next period.. or not. For starters I think two types, type A and type B are needed [1]. Likes collected from others, if you were a creator yourself, should be carried over IMO.

Where does the rubber meet the road? How can I feel the hard, cold cash in my hands?

Options:

Government directs a portion of the tax revenue to back this like based system.

Or, as an addition or replacement of today's "money = debt" system, we can have "money = likes" system. Go to a bank, in return for your like points, the bank prints money, and gives it to you. The amount of money in the circulation will be proportional to the artistic, scientific creation in that country.

Yes, people can try to abuse the system, creating circular like chains, cliques. Fortunately cliques can be analyzed using software (in computer science, CLIQUE is np-complete, it is a hard problem, but not impossible given enough processing power). Or there will be "report abuse" feature for people to self-police the system.

Given such a system, artists, scientists, inventors would scramble to copy their creations to file sharing systems themselves, instead of today's so-called "pirates".

We should not fight the current, we should learn to swim with it. The urge to stick to a system will be strong, but it's obvious to everyone with a shred of intelligence that the current system is unworkable. There is a time when the most drastic change is also the most pragmatic one.

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[1] Type A: Such points cannot be converted to cash, can only be given out as either type, and are given to citizens either by government, or non-profits. Type B: can be converted to cash, or can be given to as either type to someone else. The difference between types is aimed to discourage people to sit on their points. Type A is basically free money, is only good for indicating an interest in someone else's work, nothing else. On the receiving side, such points become convertible to cash, as type B points, which is the reward an artist gets for her work.

The creation of type A points by government (or others) can be the cash -> point conversion part of the system, corresponding to a loan payment after which the bank destroys the loan money.

[2] Some interesting ideas can be layered on top of the "like-points" payment infrastructure. Suppose a scientific paper has a list of citations at the end, and this paper gets 100 like points. The system could easily provide a scheme where a portion of points received for the paper is distributed to other papers in the citation list. So everyone who contributed to the formation of an idea, research is included in the payment.

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

2012-01-21T00:35:00.000-08:00

The Onion

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

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Hillarious.

Fuck SOPA

2012-01-20T11:56:00.000-08:00

Conservative ESTP

2012-01-16T03:30:00.000-08:00

To some the ESTP might seem like a conservative... But they are not Guardians, so how can this be?

The last letter of each type defines how such person interacts with the outside world. The J types have their judging extraverted which implies a certain 'immediacy' in their actions -- for thinking types that means making decisions about things, concepts very fast (sometimes good, sometimes bad), for feeling types it can mean coming to conclusion about people, relationships fast. On top of that a Guardian always has a Si, the result: this person is grounded to what's immediate, or what was in the past.

ESTP's seemingly conservative attitude stems from a different source.

ESTP extraverts his / her perceiving, so naturally they are open to varying experiences, they can adapt "live and let live" approach. But, they also have an inferior Ne, so future possibilities can scare them, due to a weakness. The obnoxious behaviour that follows is simply acting out this inferior experience through their freewheeling ways. Then, ESTPs seemingly conservative attitude is not a feature, it is a bug. It is something they need to grow out of. Future possibilities can be many things; a small comment, a harmless joke can scare these people.

Celebrity example: Eddie Murphy, a known ESTP is usually relaxed, (obviously) funny person. The only time I've seen him lose his shit was when he was mocked at Saturday Night Live by another comedian. Murphy apparently calls this comedian afterwards, and after the use of the word of mot...cker many times, he threatens to finish his career. That stems from a weak Ne. "Oh my God where is this all leading to!" style of thinking can scare and cloud an ESTP's mind, in such a state, everything blows out of proportion. Murphy could not see the SNL skit as harmless fun, or even the result of karma; after all, he drew many laughs for mocking Bill Cosby -- who took it like a man.

I am pretty sure an ESTP's salvation lies in exercising their Ne / Ti combination. Ti is conceptual, Ne is explorative. The more they shape these functions, the better it is for them. Otherwise they will go through life being offended, suffer creatively, and always feel cornered ready to lash out at the next guy. This is no way to live.

The Rise of the New Groupthink

2012-01-15T23:59:00.000-08:00

Susan Cain

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

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I dont care how fast people are connected; nothing moves faster than information among neurons in one person's brain. Yes to all hi-tech tools to collect, process information in a pull mode, but no to always-on constant communication that are essentially jerk circles rather than idea generating mechanisms. With "pull" we mean communication being initiated by the creator whenever s/he prefers it.

If Patents Are So Great ..

2012-01-15T13:20:00.000-08:00

Link

There were many questions from readers about whether Lotus could patent [a certain] idea. A senior [Formula-1] engineer has kindly stepped in to clear up the question of patenting F1 technical ideas for readers. His explanation is below:

The lack of patents in F1 is quite simple. It’s because if a team takes out a patent on a design, that then locks in an advantage the other teams cannot access. Therefore the other teams will simply vote it out through the FIA Technical Working Group process by the end of the season in question.

By keeping a new design in the game, a team can gamble that they can do a better job on a design than another team. Examples like seamless shift gearbox & inertia dampers are good ones. If these were patented by F1 teams, then they would have been wiped out.

Meanwhile it appears that not only does the FIA consider the Lotus idea legal, but other teams including Ferrari are already working on their own version. It will be one of the must have gizmos at the start of the 2012 season.

Lotus has applied for some patents on ideas like using mercury inside dampers, but this could be in order to sell the technology to a wider market rather than grab an initiative in F1.

Harsh Punishments for Poor Mourning

2012-01-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

Link

Daily NK learned from a source from North Hamkyung Province on January 10th, “The authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organized gatherings during the mourning period [in North Korea], or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn't seem genuine.”

Peter Lawrence: The Heart of Research is Sick

2012-01-14T05:34:00.000-08:00

Link

A senior scientist speaks out on real lives and lies in the ‘broken’ research system. Peter Lawrence explains how current research is in crisis and why young scientists are suffering.

ab Times: About ten years ago, you began publishing the first of a series of articles criticising the way in which the scientific research system is organised and the direction it’s taken. What motivated you to publish your first article, “Science or Alchemy?”(Nature Reviews Genetics 2001; 2, 139-42), in which you condemn the ‘alchemy of spin’ that has crept into research articles?

Lawrence: That’s an interesting question. Really, what started me on this was something else. When my PhD supervisor, Sir Vincent Wigglesworth died, I wrote an obituary in Nature together with another former student of his, Michael Locke. We called it “A man for our season” (Nature 1997; 386,757-8) and explained Wigglesworth’s approach to science and his ideas about putting research first and administration second. I was also asked to give the first Wigglesworth Memorial lecture at the International Congress of Entomology. I talked mostly about Wigglesworth’s scientific work but, at the end, I put in a ten minute section on his scientific style – how he saw what was going wrong with modern science and how he differed from the way things are done nowadays. (For example, he gave his students complete independence and did not put his name on their papers. He supervised ‘by example’ – he just went off and did his own research.)

I got such an overwhelming response, I realised that there was a need for a voice to express the frustration that many scientists felt, particularly young scientists, about what was happening to science. Since then, the trends that I picked out have continued, getting worse and worse and worse, until the whole fabric of science and the way we do things has become corrupted. There are many problems. Some are more interesting than others. Essentially, it’s the publication process. It has become a system of collecting counters for particular purposes – to get grants, to get tenure, etc. – rather than to communicate and illuminate findings to other people.

The literature is, by and large, unreadable. It’s all written in a kind of code, with inappropriate data in large amounts, and the storyline is becoming increasingly orchestrated by this need to publish. We all know it. We all suffer from it. I think the changes to the scientific enterprise have been inexorable and progressive. The deterioration has been so steady that people don’t really realise how much things have changed [..]

I think that we should have a system where we select for what we want. And what we want is people who make discoveries. In my opinion, science is not like some kind of an army, with a large number of people who make the main steps forward together. You need to have individually creative people who are making breakthroughs – who make things different [1]

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[1] This is also the polar opposite of the ant-like approach to science that is being advocated as 'new' these days, BTW. You cannot create an Einstein by combining 200 people whose IQ is 1. We need to supply tools, openness, collaboration mechanism in a loosely defined rewarding environment so potential Einsteins can thrive.

Inferior Function

2012-01-13T03:14:00.000-08:00

According to Jungian type theory further developed by Myers-Briggs, it seems the inferior function, the fourth, the mirror image of the dominant, mostly remain unconcious. People can learn to use it conciously, but it can become active subconciously (more so than tertiary, the third).

This function apparently is also a safety valve of sorts.. Naomi Quenk says as people learn to use top three functions, #1,#2,#3, they can be too set in their ways, become too rigid, too overly confident in themselves, becoming arrogant. In such cases #4's job is to "disrupt" the usual way of things. Mind-body connection is real, the inferior can create sickness in the biological body to disrupt everything else to make itself heard. It will create an environment so the person is forced to reconsider and go over his / her choices.

Hadrat Ali said "sickness is your sins leaving the body", Aeschylus said "wisdom comes to us by the awful grace of God". Both these sayings actually describe the same thing: the inferior, fourth function. Jung said the fourth function is the connection to subconcious which can be described by some as God. Obviously the dynamics of the outside world also have a life on their own, they too can create the perfect smackdown on a person, and some mystical orders go as far as saying the overall direction and will of this outside world can be labeled as God. I will stick to psychological explanation myself, but this is what's out there. FYI..

I highly recommend Naomi Quenk's book Was That Really Me?

How Copyright Industries Con Congress

2012-01-12T15:30:00.000-08:00

Link

I’ve yet to encounter a technically clueful person who believes the Stop Online Piracy Act will actually do anything to meaningfully reduce—let alone “stop”—online piracy [..] But then I saw the very astute David Carr’s otherwise excellent column on SOPA’s pitfalls, which took those inflated numbers more or less as gospel. The bogus numbers Carr cites [..] represent a substantial retreat from even more ludicrous statistics the copyright industries long peddled [..].

Intellectual property infringement was supposedly costing the U.S. economy $200–250 billion per year, and had killed 750,000 American jobs. That certainly sounded dire, but those numbers looked suspiciously high, and I was having trouble figuring out exactly where they had originated. I did finally run them down, and wrote up the results of my investigation in a long piece for Ars. Read the whole thing for the full, farcical story, but here’s the upshot: The $200–250 billion number had originated in a 1991 sidebar in Forbes, but it was not a measurement of the cost of “piracy” to the U.S. economy. It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the global market in counterfeit goods.

Old Testament Written in Aramaic?

2012-01-12T13:11:00.000-08:00

Peter Watson, The German Genius, pg 66

Even by the end of the seventeenth century [.. there were criticisms directed towards religion]. The Bible also came under more systematic criticism when it was shown that the original Old Testament had been written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, meaning the old scriptures could not have been dictated to Moses by God: the Old Testament was not "inspired".

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Now that's a big can of whoop-ass, isn't it? The easiest way to verify this is to carbon date this so-called original OT I guess.

Know Thy Opposite

2012-01-12T09:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it is hard to profile someone using straightforward MBTI tests, or other direct mechanisms which focus on dominant functions. In such cases we can focus on the tertiary and the inferior functions (3rd and 4th), and work backwards from there. If for tertiary and inferior we get Se,Ti we determine opposite of these, and get Ni,Fe implying an INFJ for instance. Sometimes it might be easier to identify the pathalogical, the broken, instead of what what works.

Let's talk about functions and opposites a little:

According to type theory, we somehow differentiate our dominant functions (through nurture, nature, a combo, whatever) -- and we make them dominant. We pick 2 out of 8. While we do this, we also give rise to their opposite. White does not exist without black, light without dark, right without left. The good news is, both of the opposite functions can be utilized in the service of #1 and #2, if concious effort is spent on using them this way.

However, if a person is tired, stressed, feels his dominant functions "failed" him, then tertiary and inferior funcs can subconciously take over; in these cases, they will cause episode resulting a person feeling as "not acting himself"; an almost Jekyll and Hyde scenario.

For example for an ESTP, tertiary and inferior are Fe, Ni, the latter being the inferior. Ni is about projecting, about future possibilities, but in the negative, in environments which a lot of future goals are discussed can provoke an inferior experience for ESTPs. Also as a rule, if any of the lower tier functions are activated, it usually means the other comes to play as well, so the whole thing feeds on itself -- for ESTP Ni can bring in Fe -in its negative form- which, in general, handles connecting to other people, but this time it will project animosity.

Functions in their negative forms are just weird. For example Ni in the weak form will attribute meaning to isolated minor incidences that are not there. Dominant Ni can make inferences, but in the negative the conclusions they draw will often be quite off the mark. A "message" is read into a friend’s request to borrow a car; or a wife coming home later than usual arouses suspicion, a song popping into an this person's head might be taken to mean that her supervisor is angry. The smallest thing builds up to become a huge problem. Such people while "in the grip" as Naomi Quenk calls in her book Was That Really Me? can seem quite pathalogical.

Jung (who provided the basis of much of MBTI) says:

The inferior function is always associated with an archaic personality in ourselves; in the inferior function we are all primitives. In our differentiated functions we are civilized and we are supposed to have free will; but there is no such thing as free will when it comes to the inferior function. There we have an open wound, or at least an open door through which anything might enter.

So if you cannot profile using dominants, go to tertiary and auxilary.

Money

2012-01-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

Somewhat different from Graeber's explanation, but worth checking out. The crucial point is money = debt, banks create money out of nothing to give out as debt, when debt is paid, money is destroyed. If noone was in debt, there would be no money.

"Then how is interest paid to depositors?" you ask: That money has to come from somewhere too, and in the current system, it cannot come anywhere else but from more debt (which is money) to / from someone else. Since this equation is unbalanced, overall debt must grow in order to pay back interest + satisfy regular loan demand.

The video answers basic questions such as how is money inserted in the circulation, and who decides how money there is out there, and how much. I guess if money in circulation needs any anchor, loans to people / companies could be that anchor. If someone is in debt, that person is on the hook, chances are they will be motivated to create more value in order to pay back the debt. The whole thing of course does sound like a ponzy scheme which, acording to a cynical view, could easily be labeled as such.

But increasing debt also means continous growth and that puts pressure on our energy, and non-renewable resources. A potential solution is the abolishment of the current system with a self-sustaining one. Banks lend out of a constant money supply, earn interest but distribute their earnings back to every citizen. Hence banking becomes a public service.

Let’s talk about the market economy

2012-01-11T06:02:00.000-08:00

Link

The Financial Times is debating capitalism, but what it is really debating is the future of the market economy [..].

[T]he term [capialism] came to describe the system of business organisation which had made the industrial revolution possible. By the mid-19th century that system was central to the economic landscape. Werner Siemens in Germany, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller in the US, and in Britain Richard Arkwright’s successors. As individuals or with a small group of active partners, they built and owned both the factories and plants in which the new working class was employed, and the machinery inside them [..].

If the first half of the 20th century was a time of fundamental change in the nature of business organisation, the second half was a time of fundamental change in the nature of business success. The value of raw materials is only a small part of the value of the production of a complex modern economy, and the value of physical assets is only a small part of the value of most modern businesses. The critical resources of today’s company are not its buildings and machines but its competitive advantages – its systems of organisation, its reputation with suppliers and customers, its capacity for innovation. These attributes are not, in any relevant sense, capable of being owned by anyone at all.

The typical reader of this article works in front of a computer at a desk in an office block. He or she probably does not know who owns any of these things. It is quite likely that each is owned by someone different – a pension fund, a property company or a leasing business – none of whom is their employer.

People do not know who owns their work tools because the answer does not matter. If your boss pushes you around, exploits you or appropriates your surplus value, the reasons have nothing to do with the ownership of capital. While control over the means of production and exchange matters a great deal to the organisation of business and the power structures of society, ownership of the means of production and exchange matters very little.

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. By continuing to use the 19th-century term capitalism for an economic system that has evolved into something altogether different, we are liable to misunderstand the sources of strength of the market economy and the role capital plays within it.

Lost Decade?

2012-01-11T02:06:00.000-08:00

Link

Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed [..] But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades [..]

• Japan’s average life expectancy at birth grew by 4.2 years [..]
• Japan has made remarkable strides in Internet infrastructure. Although as late as the mid-1990s it was ridiculed as lagging, it has now turned the tables. [..]
• Measured from the end of 1989, the yen has risen 87 percent against the U.S. dollar [..]
• The unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, about half of that in the United States [..].

William J. Holstein, a prominent Japan watcher since the early 1980s, recently visited the country for the first time in some years. “There’s a dramatic gap between what one reads in the United States and what one sees on the ground in Japan,” he said. “The Japanese are dressed better than Americans. They have the latest cars, including Porsches, Audis, Mercedes-Benzes and all the finest models. I have never seen so many spoiled pets. And the physical infrastructure of the country keeps improving and evolving.”

The CIA, patron of modern art

2012-01-10T11:25:00.000-08:00

Link

Frances Saunders reports in the British newspaper The Independent that modern art, particularly abstract expressionism, was funded by the C.I.A. as part of its covert war on communism [..].

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete...