Consider, too, that in 1960 we spoke of the First World and the Third World; today we speak of the developed world and the developing world, the part that is looking to copy the West. The developed world is where we expect nothing more to happen. The earlier dichotomy was fairly pro-technology and in some ways more agnostic on the prospects for globalization. The present dichotomy is extremely bullish on globalization and implicitly pessimistic about technology. Of course, we can point to the great fortunes that have been made in the tech industry, but of the great fortunes that have been made in the world over the past twenty or thirty years, most have not been made in technology. Look at the Russian oligarchs. Maybe one out of a hundred billionaires has a tech-related fortune. The others are a political thing linked somehow to globalization. So that’s why I think it’s important to quantify these things correctly. We tend to focus a lot on the optimistic tech narrative that notes a lot of progress, but I think the more important question is why it hasn’t been happening.
Unfortunately financial calculators show with the current inflation figures and interest rates, savings of $100 per month in a child’s 529 plan utilizing an age-based strategy from birth to college-age may not amass enough even to pay for the first year’s expenses.
Am I saving enough for my kids’ college? | BrightScope
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Of course the answer is “no, you are not saving enough,” because it’s impossible to save a billion dollars (projected cost of our daughter’s tuition) over 18 years.
The way I see it, there’s a lack of need for any legislation at all. As a publisher, I have a very deep experience here, and the fact is that piracy is not a significant problem. Yes, there are people who are pirating my books, there are people who are sharing links to places where they can be downloaded. But the vast majority of customers are willing to pay if the product is widely available and the price is fair.
George Skelton: Let’s make textbooks affordable. Making textbooks truly affordable, or even available free, is the least we can do for California’s beleaguered college and university students. And the state would ultimately benefit.
State Senate leader Darrell Steinberg plans to introduce legislation aimed at slashing the price of textbooks to about $20.
Smart. I hope this idea gains traction, and I’m curious to see how the textbook cabal organizes to quash it. The market cannot bear insanely priced textbooks for much longer.
"Liberating Workers" →
Christina Cacioppo on why Cherry, an iPhone app that lets you order an an immediate car wash, is compelling:
Like Opez, Cherry enables car washers to become freelancers. They don’t need to work for a car-washing shop and so can retain more of the profits generated by their work.
Historically, one service provided by a car-washing shop has been finding, staying in touch with, and retaining customers. The internet’s made it relatively easier for anyone – from a solo car washer to a car-wash shop manager – to find and retain customers: Angie’s List, Yelp, Groupon, foursquare .. the list of tools goes on and on. (And will continue to go on and on.) A motivated individual can use these tools by himself or herself or can rely on a lighter-weight solution (like Cherry) for the heavy lifting.
We’ll see more of services supporting newly liberated workers.
Spot on. But this is a fine line to walk…
Think of your workplace. How much of what exists around you is maintenance and support for the real reason you’re there? What percentage of your day do you use the talent which makes you valuable?
Car washes and data-verification (which is what we’re seeing Mechanical Turk being used for) are low hanging fruit. These are low skill, low support tasks. If companies continue to keep their focus tight on these menial tasks, the future looks rather bleak. But once their gaze widens to more skilled work, it becomes less about businesses avoiding paying overhead and more about workers optimizing their need to be at a desk 9 hours a day.
Which leads you to reforming how salaries are structured, what health care looks like, what offices are, what a career actually is… It’s a tough nut to crack, both culturally, ethically, and technically.
I’ve been thinking about Christina’s post about Cherry for the past week and I like where Drew takes it, especially by pointing out that the ultra-democratization of labor will run up against some very interesting ethical questions.
Many of the “inefficiencies” evident in large organizations that manage low-skilled labor exist to create more humane working conditions. Salaries, access to training, access to capital goods, access to health care, et cetera aren’t just niceties or fair compensation. They help keep the populace sane.
I’m a fan of creative destruction, but we should be mindful of the stress we put upon individuals as we disrupt old sclerotic institutions (like car washes!).
To those who might wish to “torrent” this video: look, I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions.
Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Sincerely,
Louis C.K.
Support this man. (via radioon)
The U.S. national debt (red) compared to U.S. GDP (blue) from 1940 to 2016 (estimated from 2011 to 2016) – top chart with a linear scale, bottom chart with a logarithmic one.
Since the selected 75-year time frame is impressively long, we should take some time to examine this wealth of information more closely. Take a good look at the chart with the linear scale, then the chart with the logarithmic one, and see for yourself:
- You can’t get much information on the first 25 years from the linear scale. The large values at the end of the series dominate the small values at the beginning. You think you are seeing the development of the data when in reality you aren’t. Your look at the historical data does not achieve the desired result, and collecting the data was a waste of time. And worst of all, you have a completely wrong impression.
- The logarithmic scale shows that the sharpest rise in debt in the past took place in the 1940s. From 1944 through 1948, the debt was larger than the GDP. From 1948 on, GDP growth was always clearly larger than that of the national debt.
- If you look at the linear scale between 1965 and 1983, you think you are seeing the “good old days”. GDP growth was apparently much faster than that of the national debt. The logarithmic scale, however, straightens out the story. It shows a development that is almost parallel and, in fact, it is. The GDP and national debt grew by 400 and 326 percent respectively in this period.
- The period from 1983 to 1993 is also deceptive but in the opposite way. Although the gap between the data actually decreased, the linear scale shows a seemingly parallel development. While the GDP rose by 90 %, the overall debt on the other hand tripled in this period. This is the reality – and this is what the logarithmic scale shows.
We wanted to prove that you don’t have to know logarithms in order to understand logarithmic data. However, you need to know the pitfalls of linear scales if you don’t want to misinterpret linear data. In our example, you would have to see the pattern of the logarithmic scale in the linear chart to still be a skeptic regarding logarithms. You would have to be able to identify and interpret all the distortions of the linear chart just by looking at it. My eyes couldn’t do that – could yours?
Market contracting is, in an important sense, an adversarial process: purchasers try to obtain the best goods or services at the lowest price possible; sellers try to provide the lowest-cost goods or services at the highest price possible. Some individuals enjoy this contest, and most participants in market economies are acculturated to engaging in it with a fair degree of indifference, at least in conventional commercial contexts. Yet some individuals evidently find it unpleasant to obtain or provide goods or services through such adversarial relationships!
In assessing the relative efficiency of alternative economic arrangements, received economic theory generally ignores such preferences concerning transactional processes, as opposed to preferences concerning transactional outcomes such as price and quality of performance. It does not necessarily follow, of course, that these preferences are unimportant. And, where they are important, market contracting brings the cost of running counter to them.
An alternative interpretation of alienation is that individuals gain important satisfaction from having a feeling of control over an enterprise they patronize, or from participating with other patrons in its governance – satisfaction that may be lost when they deal with the firm only through market relationships.
—The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann
I think about this passage all the time. It informs my vision of how Open San Diego could operate.
What is a market, if it’s not a community?
Information, Paradigms, Economics, and Ethics
Alexis Madrigal on the TechCrunch / Crunch Fund debate:
…the set of solutions to common information problems that we call journalism is coming unglued as different types of publications become possible on the Internet. …
Bias in journalism has been the default assumption forever. The journalism ethics that David Carr represents was an important invention that arose to fight pervasive bias. It didn’t just happen. It partially solved the trustworthiness problem, at least temporarily.
Philip Greenspun on how the Web and the Weblog has changed writing:
In the 1980s Steve Ward, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, described a sure-fire dieting scheme. “All that you need for my diet is graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil,” Steve would explain. “The horizontal axis is time, one line per day. The vertical axis is weight in lbs. You plot your current weight on the left side of the paper. You plot your desired weight on a desired date towards the right side, making sure that you’ve left the correct number of lines in between (one per day). You draw a line from the current weight/date to the desired weight/date. Every morning you weigh yourself and plot the result. If the point is below the line, you eat whatever you want all day. If the point is above the line, you eat nothing but broccoli or some other low-calorie food.”
Steve’s diet is probably more effective than most popular diets. How come he isn’t a bestselling diet book author? How do you turn an idea that can be explained in one paragraph into a diet book that people will buy? Printing that one paragraph really large would take up one page.
Big-box retailers are poised to take advantage of a richer part of the value chain. They could move from being huge retailers to becoming huge product service and repair providers. Walmart and other big-boxers could become the center of gravity for the conservation of goods, employ people with actual know-how, and develop deeper, longer term, more profitable relationships with their customers.
