TOM THE DANCING BUG: Super-Fun-Pak, featuring Pato Afortunado mit Heinrich Hund!
By Ruben Bolling at 8:45 am Wednesday, May 23
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"How can you be serious?" Not by wearing this T-shirt! The classic Mark Pawson T-shirt, updated for 2012.
By Ruben Bolling at 8:45 am Wednesday, May 23
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By Cory Doctorow at 5:00 pm Tuesday, May 15
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Jun 1, Sydney Vivid Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom | Context (essays) With a Little Help (short stories) For the Win (YA novel) Makers (adult novel) |
Gazillionaire financier Mitt Romney is the latest "CEO President" offered up by the GOP, on a platform of "job creation." When Romney oversaw Bain capital, he supervised the takeover of American Pad and Paper. When the deal was complete, the 258 employees were marched out of the Marion, Indiana factory, told they were fired, and told they could re-apply for their jobs at lower salaries and with fewer benefits. They were warned that some of them would not be re-hired. A long piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Ron Scherer and Leigh Montgomery consider the record of his imperial corporateness:
“We were told they bought the assets, not the union or the [labor] contract,” recalls Randy Johnson, who at the time worked as a machine operator and was a union shop steward. The workers – some the third generation in their families to have jobs there – eventually went on strike, and Bain closed the factory 5-1/2 months after acquiring it...
In an analysis of Bain Capital under Romney, the Journal estimated that Bain made $2.5 billion in profits on $1.1 billion invested in 77 separate deals. Of those 77 transactions, 22 percent ended with the firms in bankruptcy after the eighth year of the Bain investment. Bain disputes the Journal’s account as inaccurate.
Is Mitt Romney really a job creator? What his Bain Capital record shows. (via Reddit)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:40 am Tuesday, May 15
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Jun 1, Sydney Vivid Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom | Context (essays) With a Little Help (short stories) For the Win (YA novel) Makers (adult novel) |
Filmmaker (and comics creator and novelist and games developer) Jim Munroe is raising money to take his outstanding science fiction feature Ghosts With Shit Jobs on tour.
Here's Jim's summary: "In the future, jobs still suck -- but in whole new ways. The economic collapse of the west is complete and North Americans are a cheap labour pool for wealthy Asian and Indian markets. A Chinese documentary show focuses on these unlucky enough to have been born in the slums of Toronto in a special report that translates as 'Ghosts With Shit Jobs'. The lo-fi sci-fi mockumentary feature offers both a commentary on the economic downturn and a model for surviving in it -- it was made for $4000."
He's selling the movie on a USB bracelet in 1080p as a way of raising the dough to tour the flick:
This USB bracelet comes pre-loaded with Ghosts With Shit Jobs in full 1080p resolution with no DRM aftertaste. After you watch the movie, you can use it as a digital security bracelet -- when the Cloud is repossessed in 2025 you'll have a local back-up of 8 gigabytes of your most precious data on your body at all times.
Tour for GHOSTS WITH SHIT JOBS, a Lo-fi Sci-fi Feature (Thanks, Jim!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:08 pm Tuesday, May 8
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Jun 1, Sydney Vivid Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom | Context (essays) With a Little Help (short stories) For the Win (YA novel) Makers (adult novel) |
The Guardian: Blueprint for Democratic Participation from The Guardian and The Paley Center for Media on FORA.tv
Here's Yochai Benkler -- author of Wealth of Networks, one of the most important books written about how the Internet changes society -- describing the fight to stop SOPA with laser clarity and precision, cutting through the DC/media consensus that "Google killed SOPA" or "Wikipedia killed SOPA" and showing instead how the ecosystem of people who care about networks collaborated to do the unprecedented.
The Guardian: Blueprint for Democratic Participation (via Michael Geist)
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:53 am Friday, Apr 27
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I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.
Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us
Upcoming Appearances
• April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP.
•April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP.
• April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere.
• April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum
• July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
Back in 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the economics Nobel Prize for showing that human beings don't have a really good intuitive grasp of risk. Basically, the decisions we make when faced with a risky proposition depend more on how the question is framed than on what the actual outcome might be.
The classic example is to tell a subject that there's going to be a disaster. Out of 600 people, she has a chance of saving 200 if she takes x risk. If she doesn't take the risk, everybody dies. Most people will take the risk in that scenario, but if you present the same situation and frame it differently—"If you take this risk, 400 people will die"—the decisions suddenly flip in the other direction. Nothing has changed about the outcome. But everything has changed in terms of how people feel about the decision they have to make. This is the kind of thing that matters a lot to economics because it helps to explain why economic behavior in the real world isn't always as rational and self-interested as it is in theory.
There's a new study out in the journal Psychological Science that might add another layer of complexity to Kahneman's research. If you're thinking and talking in your native language, you're likely to respond to a risky situation pretty much exactly as in the classic example. But, these researchers found that if you're thinking and talking about the situation in a second language, things change. At Wired, Brandon Keim explains:
The first experiment involved 121 American students who learned Japanese as a second language. Some were presented in English with a hypothetical choice: To fight a disease that would kill 600,000 people, doctors could either develop a medicine that saved 200,000 lives, or a medicine with a 33.3 percent chance of saving 600,000 lives and a 66.6 percent chance of saving no lives at all.
Nearly 80 percent of the students chose the safe option. When the problem was framed in terms of losing rather than saving lives, the safe-option number dropped to 47 percent. When considering the same situation in Japanese, however, the safe-option number hovered around 40 percent, regardless of how choices were framed. The role of instinct appeared reduced.
That's interesting. The researchers tried this basic thing with several different groups of people—mostly native English speakers—and used several different risk scenarios, some involving loss of life, others involving loss of a job, and others involving decisions about betting money on a coin toss. They saw the same results in all the tests: People thinking in their second language weren't as swayed by the emotional impact of framing devices.
One study doesn't prove this is universally true. Even if it is true, nobody knows yet exactly why. But Keim says that the researchers think the difference lies in emotional distance. If you have to pause and really put some brain power into thinking about grammar and vocabulary, you can't just jump straight into the knee-jerk reaction.
Read the rest of Keim's write-up on the study at Wired.com
Via Marilyn Terrell
By Cory Doctorow at 1:00 pm Tuesday, Apr 24
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Jun 1, Sydney Vivid Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom | Context (essays) With a Little Help (short stories) For the Win (YA novel) Makers (adult novel) |
A British game-show called "Golden Balls" concludes each installment with a single-shot version of the Prisoner's Dilemma in which the two players' choices can result in a large cash prize being awarded to both of them, neither of them, or just one of them. The players are allowed to tell each other what they plan on doing, but they are also allowed to lie and try to trick the other player into making a choice that would leave the whole pot in the trickster's hands.
In this remarkable clip, a player named Nick runs an extraordinary end-game that has to be seen to be believed. As Bruce Schneier says,
This is the weirdest, most surreal round of "Split or Steal" I have ever seen. The more I think about the psychology of it, the more interesting it is. I'll save my comments for the comments, because I want you to watch it before I say more. Really.
Once you've watched the clip, check out Bruce's spoiler-y discussion of what is going on there.
By Xeni Jardin at 12:08 pm Tuesday, Apr 24
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
Atlanta Magazine has an interview with Otis Webb Brawley, M.D., and an excerpt from his new book "How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America."
The excerpt tells the story of 53-year-old Edna Riggs, of Atlanta, Georgia. Fear of cancer, medical debt, and losing her job caused her to not seek treatment for her breast cancer until it reached a very advanced state.
(Graphic content, may be upsetting; via @rogersmatthew)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:55 am Wednesday, Apr 18
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Jun 1, Sydney Vivid Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom | Context (essays) With a Little Help (short stories) For the Win (YA novel) Makers (adult novel) |
Laurence Lewis's Daily Kos editorial, "The cruel stupidity that is economic austerity," is a blazing indictment of austerity as a means of recovering from recession, and it cites experts and statistics showing that austerity programs (in Europe, particularly) are deepening the recession, destroying lives, and demolishing vital social institutions that are especially needed in economic downturns. Lewis's citations are not to the usual suspects in the fight against austerity, but rather to rock-ribbed conservatives and publications like The Economist, the chief economist of Standard Chartered, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. And there's Joseph Stiglitz, who compares austerity to medieval blood-letting: "when you took the blood out, the patient got sicker. The response then was more blood-letting until the patient very nearly died. What is happening in Europe is a mutual suicide pact."
How bad is it?
* In Greece, we now have record unemployment, which includes the majority of young workers. Homelessness is up 20 percent, with soup kitchens in Athens reporting record demand, and the usually low suicide rate having doubled.
* Portugal has complied completely with the austerity demands it accepted for its bailout deal, but its debt is growing and its economy is shrinking, its unemployment rate continues to reach new heights, there is a crisis in medical care, and a 40 percent rise in emigration, with the Portuguese government acknowledging its own failure by actually encouraging its citizenry to leave.
* In Spain, austerity has resulted in falling industrial output and deepening debt, with record unemployment and a stunning rate of 50 percent youth unemployment. And the Spanish government's incomprehensible response is to impose even more crushing austerity.
* Ireland has fallen back into recession as austerity has led to falling economic output. A better future is being sacrificed, as young workers look for work abroad, "generation emigration" expected to number 75,000 this year.
* The success of Italy's wealthy technocrat government was concisely summarized in similar terms: Italy's austerity measures are stunting activity in the euro-zone's third-largest economy, recent budget and economic data show, suggesting the steps are backfiring.
The cruel stupidity that is economic austerity (via Making Light)
(Image: GREEKS PROTEST AUSTERITY CUTS, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from piazzadelpopolo's photostream)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:59 pm Tuesday, Apr 17
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Jun 1, Sydney Vivid Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom | Context (essays) With a Little Help (short stories) For the Win (YA novel) Makers (adult novel) |
On Tor.com, author and reviewer Jo Walton has an insightful look at why so many science fiction readers and writers are discussing David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a book that is already a darling of the Occupy movement:
One of the problems with writing science fiction and fantasy is creating truly different societies. We tend to change things but keep other things at societal defaults. It’s really easy to see this in older SF, where we have moved on from those societal defaults and can thus laugh at seeing people in the future behaving like people in the fifties. But it’s very difficult to create genuinely innovative societies, and in genuinely different directions. As a British reader coming to SF there were a lot of things I thought were people’s amazing imagination that turned out to be normal American things and cultural defaults. And no matter how much research you do, it’s always easier in the anglosphere to find books and primary sources in English and about our own history and the history of people who have interacted with us. And both history and anthropology tend to be focused on one period, one place, so it’s possible to research a specific society you know you want to know about, but hard to find things that are about the range of options different societies have chosen.
What Debt does is to focus on a question of morality, first by framing the question, and then by examining how a really large number of human societies over a huge geographical and historical range have dealt with this issue, and how they have interacted with other people who have very different ideas about it. It’s a huge issue of the kind that shapes societies and cultures, so in reading it you encounter a whole lot of contrasting cultures. Graeber has some very interesting ideas about it, and lots of fascinating details, and lots of thought provoking connections.
For a more academic discussion of Debt among political scientists and economists, see this Crooked Timber seminar on the book, and the author's reply. I liked Debt, but was also frustrated by the amount of circling back and meandering the author engages in. That said, it was one of my more thought-provoking reads of 2011.
By Ruben Bolling at 9:30 am Wednesday, Apr 11
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By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 11:00 am Wednesday, Apr 4
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I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.
Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us
Upcoming Appearances
• April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP.
•April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP.
• April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere.
• April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum
• July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
Two years ago, if you'd asked me what I thought about something like cap and trade, or a carbon tax, I would have said that they were interesting ideas, but probably not worth the trouble of fighting for. I didn't think a price on carbon was necessary and, in fact, I was worried it could do more harm than good.
Doing the research for my book, Before the Lights Go Out, changed my perspective. There are risks to any mechanism you use to put a price on carbon (there are risks to everything we do), and it's still not something we could institute easily (thanks, politics!), but I've come to think that this one thing could be the easiest method to change the way we make and use energy. Energy—and more importantly, reducing fossil fuel use—isn't intuitive. It's often hard to see how we're using fossil fuels, and make decisions about how to use less of them. A price on carbon, however you do it, takes some of the guesswork out of that. Instead of having to become some kind of Super Green Living Expert, all you have to do is do what's cheapest.
Grist.org posted an excerpt from my book this week, and they also did a short interview with me. One of the things they asked about was carbon pricing:
We’ve become dependent on fossil fuels for a reason — not because of any evil plot, but because these fuels are just that much more powerful than anything that came before them. The power of coal, the portability of liquid gasoline: There is amazing value there. At the same time, we’re also talking about fuels we have limited supplies of. And those fuels, when we use them, also cost us money in the form of health-care costs and climate change adaptation costs.
Right now, the price we pay for those fuels doesn’t really account for either the amazing benefits or the awful limitations. It’s an artificial price, based on simple, direct supply and demand. It doesn’t take the long term into account. It doesn’t take economy-wide effects into account.
If we valued fossil fuels at what they are really worth to us, then a lot of the other stuff would fall into place. That mixture of technologies and policies would happen faster, and more naturally, because it would be based on a natural incentive.
It’s reasonable for people to not want to spend half their paycheck on a fuel that is absolutely necessary to their life. But paradoxically, if we had a price on carbon, and the cost of those fuels went up, then businesses and governments and individuals would find ways to get people the services they needed at a lower cost. Right now, there’s not enough of an incentive for that.
Read the rest of the interview at Grist.org
Read more about why I think carbon pricing matters in Before the Lights Go Out.
Image: Black coal or charcoal for cooking, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from epsos's photostream
By Cory Doctorow at 5:56 pm Saturday, Mar 31
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Jun 1, Sydney Vivid Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom | Context (essays) With a Little Help (short stories) For the Win (YA novel) Makers (adult novel) |
Tomi Ahonen has a really interesting post on how it is that major, top-selling phone companies -- Siemens, Motorola, Palm, Nokia, Windows Mobile, RIM -- can see their sales fall off a cliff as the whole world seems to decide, en masse, that the phones are no longer the bee's knees. Ahonen marks it up to the fast replacement-cycle with phones, the tenuous relationship with dealers, and the concentration of power among the carriers.
I think there are three factors that help create The Cliff. First, there is the replacement cycle. The average replacement cycle for mobile phones in year 2000 was 21 months. By year 2006 it was down to 18 months. Today it is 16 months (all handsets). For smartphones it is even faster, at 11.5 months. A car is replaced something like every 3 or 4 years on average. A TV set once every 7 years. A personal computer every 3 and a half years. But mobile phones are replaced every year and a half, smartphones replaced every year (on average).
So if you have a bad model car, and your sales suffers because of it, you will not lose all your loyal customers in a year or two, because many of your customers have last year's model and are happy with it, and will not even come to your car dealership until two years from now to consider the replacement model, by which time you have had plenty of time to fix the problems with your current car model.
In mobile phones we do not have that luxury. The pace is so fast. And note that the rate of the collapse due to The Cliff is actually accelerating. This also suggests the replacement cycle and The Cliff are related.
A second point is the dealerships. Some technology is kind of 'protected' from rapid market fluctiations, because it is sold by the manufacturer's own stores (like Sony flagship stores for example) or through branded dealerships (like in new car sales) or by registered partners (like many personal computers, sold through 'VARs' Value Add Resellers, who are authorized with given PC brands). In mobile phones, there used to be no branded shops (Apple changed that of course) and Nokia briefly tried its own Nokia branded flagship stores - most of them have been discontinued. So if you have branded dealers, that helps dampen the fluctuation, even if you have a bad model year of your products, the damaging effect is not as severe. Mobile phones are sold whether in operator/carrier stores, or independent handset retailers, with essentially all handset brands and many of their models on display side-by-side in the store. Note, that of current handset makers, only Apple is a little bit immunized but not completely so, as it also operates its own Apple stores.
The third point is the carrier relationship. The operator/carrier has exceptional influence in the mobile phone handset business. If the carrier/operator decides to push a given phone, it can help it succeed, yes, but that is not dramatic gains. But if the the carrier/operator community decides to punish a given brand, it rapidly dies. We heard just now from Finland (of all places) that a survey of major handset stores in the biggest cities of Finland by the commerical TV broadcaster MTV3 - found that in most handset stores (both operator stores and independent stores) - even if the consumer asked for the Nokia Lumia by name - most sales representatives would not show the Nokia Lumia to the customer, and showed Samsung Android handsets instead. This even as the stores had Lumia in stock and the biggest in-store displays were featuring Lumia.
The 'Cliff Theory' ie How Handset Makers Die, why in Mobile Phones do Companies Collapse so Rapidly (Siemens, Motorola, Palm, Nokia, Blackberry and Windows Mobile) (via Beyond the Beyond)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:30 pm Wednesday, Mar 21
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Jun 1, Sydney Vivid Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom | Context (essays) With a Little Help (short stories) For the Win (YA novel) Makers (adult novel) |
Writing in The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann describes the popping of the "law school bubble," which saw large numbers of law-school enrollees who hoped to graduate into six-figure salaries but instead are facing "six figures of crushing debt and murky career prospects."
These new statistics are the latest evidence that young Americans are getting the hint that the market for lawyers is perhaps not what it once was. It wouldn't matter that fewer people were taking the LSAT if the same number of young folks were ultimately showing up for their first year of law school each fall. But that total seems to be dropping, too. According to the LSAC, the number of students who accepted admission to a law school dropped 8 percent last year, from 49,700, to 45,617 -- the smallest incoming class since at least 2002. (Last year's number isn't published on the Council's website yet, but was provided to me by a spokeswoman). The number of applications also dropped dramatically, which could force law schools to ease up on their mind bogglingly expensive tuition.
One might argue that the drop-offs in test takers and applicants are just the result of an improving economy. After all, more people go to law school when the broader job market is weak. But America's slowly brightening employment picture doesn't seem like a likely cause in this instance. At the AmLaw Daily, Matt Leichter forecasts the size of this year's final applicant pool per law school, and compares it to the trend in the United States' employment to population ratio. When this few people are working, you be expecting to see an increase in law school applications.
By Cory Doctorow at 11:19 am Wednesday, Mar 21
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Jun 1, Sydney Vivid Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom | Context (essays) With a Little Help (short stories) For the Win (YA novel) Makers (adult novel) |
I found Tania Branigan's Guardian article on China's coming demographic spasm really interesting. China's One Child policy means that there's a giant cohort of imminent retirees and a much smaller group of young adults of working age who'll have to support them. Combine that with the tradition (and law) of filial piety, which puts responsibility for the elderly on their children, increased life-expectancy, and a shame-taboo against retirement homes, and you've got the makings of some very turbulent times ahead.
China's economic miracle has been fuelled by its "demographic dividend": an unusually high proportion of working age citizens. That population bulge is becoming a problem as it ages. In 2000 there were six workers for every over-60. By 2030, there will be barely two.
Other countries are also ageing and have far lower birth rates. But China is the first to face the issue before it has developed – and the shift is two to three times as fast.
"China is unique: she is getting older before she has got rich," said Wang Dewen, of the World Bank's China social protection team.
Tens of millions of workers have migrated to the cities, creating an even worse imbalance in rural areas which already suffer low incomes, poor public services and minimal social security.
Most old people there rely on their own labour and their children. China not only needs to support more older people for longer, but to extend support to new parts of society. World Bank researchers point to promising advances, such as the national rural pension scheme and the expansion of health insurance.
China can help deal with increased costs by raising its retirement age; at present, only about a fifth of urban women are still working at 55. Improving education should also raise productivity. Some experts believe such measures will be enough to wipe out the "demographic debt". Others wonder if China will begin to welcome immigrants.