Um... I didn't say using Vatican as a metonym was wrong. I only object to doing so when it's anachronistic, especially in what purports to be a work about history. It's like talking about the American war for independence as a battle between Washington D.C. and London.
The language does not become richer by the sloppy use of poetic language. In fact, I agree with Orwell in "Politics and the English Language" that using figures of speech after we've lost a sense of the what the figure indicates does not enrich the language so much as it impoverishes thought.
NP. I get info so often from folks on Slashdot (I'm only an amateur nerd, not a professional) that I'm always excited to share about things closer to my own specialty.
People are sloppy in the use of the term "Vatican". A good example of this is in one of the sorriest books written by a modern, professional historian. The author constantly and annoyingly uses "Vatican" as a metonym for the papacy when talking about a period centuries before anyone would have so employed the term.
Yes, they have what amounts to a paper shawl, though I don't recall what they charge for it. When we visited, my wife and I were familiar with the dress code and since her shoulders were covered it wasn't an issue for us. We did loan her head-covering to a young lady, however, who used it as a shawl to get through without buying the paper version.
I also think it's cute that you think Slashdot of all places "believes in the Vatican".
Or that Catholics do believe the papacy because of the Donation of Constantine. It was a Catholic priest who identified the forgery, and that over five centuries ago. Anyone who thinks this is a challenge to Catholic beliefs doesn't understand Catholicism.
There's nothing particularly Byzantine about that letter that looks like a "C". It's called a lunate sigma and it's been around since the Hellenistic period. And the scripts written in the crypts are not miniscule; they're very decidedly majuscule. One is rather unlikely to find Greek written in miniscule in a 2nd-4th c. Roman catacomb, given that Greek miniscule would not be invented for another five centuries.
Now, if you happen to have a little Greek, you might have come to the conclusion that these scripts must be Byzantine since your Attic Greek textbook uses letters that look quite different. But the fact is that modern printed Greek, whether classical, koine, or Byzantine, uses a post-classical script. With the invention of printing, printers created a miniscule script similar to that found in the Byzantine manuscripts they were using. Unless you're working specifically on paleography, none of your textbooks or printed editions are going to use a classical script.
After submitting an article in which kleargear.com was referred to as "some sort of cheap ThinkGeek clone", Slashdot user sabri will be facing several thousand dollars in fines. The stupid asses at kleargear.com don't seem to realize that this sort of thing only gets them bad press. [Editors note: The remainder of this comment has been removed as kleargear.com is threatening Dice Holdings if defamation of their good name continues on our properties.]
In this at least, academia had it right and the rest of society has it wrong.
The traditions of the academy stem from outdated (medieval) notions of freedom. Colleges are supposed to be collegiate, as groups of free scholars able to speak their minds freely. The university administration should serve the colleges and if the administration is corrupt then the scholars owe it to the institution and to their students to object. Otherwise, there is no check on the administration.
Professors should not be mere employees. (Of course, as you'll see, I don't think anyone is or should be a mere employee.) They ought to be members of a guild, granted the right to teach freely because they're recognized and accepted by their peers. Anything less and they become mere proletariat, providing their labor to a large institution which claims the right to fire them at whim.
Now, I say all this recognizing that de facto faculty are mere employees. For this reason, I've even argued that faculty ought to unionize. If we can't have the guild, at least we can have the union to offset the power of our employer.
Lest one should say this thinking makes me "entitled" because I'm an academic, as though that were something special, I would say this again: the rest of society has it wrong. Your employer does not own you. You are a free man or a free woman. If you perform your duties diligently, the duties you've promised to perform by agreement, you ought to be remunerated. Beyond this, they have no claim on you. It is a crime against the freedom and dignity of people that we've allowed employers to command our lives outside that time we've given them in exchange for payment. It is a great loss that we've reduced our notion of freedom to a mere matter of politics, while allowing employment organizational charts to dictate our lives in ways we would never tolerate from government.
Sitting here in an academic library, a janitor just walked by and wiped off the table next to me. So long as he continues to wipe off tables when he is obligated to do so, he ought in spare time to be able to call me, the university president, or the president of the United States a useless layabout.
I would propose that our notion of freedom extend beyond mere politics. I would submit that employers do not own their employees and that work is not the most important aspect of life. And while I am at it, I would close down everything but essential services on Thanksgiving day. The medieval peasant had more holidays than the modern proletariat. I've grown tired of the implication that longer hours away from loved ones, serving some robber baron who will leave one jobless and destitute for speaking ill of him, can be called progress
So, yes, I am an academic. I claim certain anachronistic rights and I wish only the same for you./anachronisticrant
With every university running a computer network and a web site, paying for servers is the least costly component of research.
One of the interesting points the speaker made concerned exactly this. If more of scholarship turned toward open access, libraries could shift money from paying for subscriptions to supporting journals or journal mirrors. They'd likely save considerable cash doing so. More importantly, they'd retain their function as a repository of knowledge, a function increasingly challenged by the presses.
Still, the transition to open journals you postulate can't forget that the whole process depends on some method of distinguishing actual scientific research from junk science posted by whack jobs.
Indeed. But in principle, there's no reason peer review cannot also occur in an online open access journal. In fact, such things already exist. (Work by NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World highlights the potential of this.)
The big hurdle is one of prestige. Publishers hold the prestige for now. Being published is a means of getting the bragging rights necessary to get a job, tenure, and promotion. But the only thing that really gives the publishers such prestige is the voluntary efforts of generations of scholars doing peer-review. The sooner scholars realize that they themselves are the real basis for scholarly prestige, the better.
Last week I spoke at an academic conference where another scholar argued for the use of open-access, open-data journals in our field. With a representative of one of the major university presses sitting right next to him, he made the bold (and correct) argument that the presses were attempting to control content going forward, even if it means strangling libraries and stifling scholarly production. He treated open-access publication as a question of scholarly freedom.
He was completely misunderstood.
As an historian among historians, I expected some resistance to any suggestion that scholarly practices should change. In at least one sense of the word, we're a conservative bunch. But the objections which were raised made me consider a career change. I may as well be a paleontologist if I'm going to walk among living dinosaurs. Nothing's free, one opined, as someone has to pay for the servers. Never mind that our presenter wasn't speaking of cost. We're in a golden age of plagiarism, said another, and this would make things worse. Never mind that we're actually in a golden age of catching plagiarists. A third worried that the ability to search for a keyword in a document would mean people wouldn't read the larger context in which the keyword appears. I can't help but imagining this individual using a razor blade on the indices of her student's textbooks.
Between embargoes, copyright restrictions, and the extraordinary expense libraries have to accept to keep subscription, scholarship is suffering when it ought to be flourishing. Of all people, we in the humanities ought to recognize this fact (last I heard, academic libraries tend to spend around 70-80% of their budgets on science and medicine journals, the rest going to facilities, staff, and last of all humanities). But there I watched a generation of scholars fail utterly to see the copyrighted text on the wall. A shift to open-access is the future of scholarship, but it will take a generation before it can happen. Rather, I should say it will take two generations. The first, mine, will publish in open peer-reviewed journals but not exclusively. We know we need to publish in the older titles if we want jobs and tenure. But once we're in place, we'll be able to accept open journals for their potential, recognizing the value of the next generation's publications in quality open journals.
Well, not yet anyway. I'm sure we'll see ever more proposals to support 'competition, innovation, and free market principles by offering premium and economy broadband packages,' or something like that, from TimeWarner, Comcast, and the like.
As any good Marxist will tell you, unions will not get you to socialism (unless they rather suddenly go revolutionary). They will get you to neoliberalism. The problem is that their interests are tied to those of their industrialist employers. They want a bigger slice of the pie but, ultimately, they also want to maintain the system that keeps them fed.
Unions take a rather conservative (in the looser sense of the term) approach to the labor issue. They're content to have the capitalist own the capital. They only ask that labor get a more equitable share of the revenue. This is not the case with a genuine socialist.
If you want an understanding of what "socialist" means in American political discourse (I'm guessing you're from the old country, given your sig and your spelling conventions), then search sometime for "AM talk radio" and listen in for a few hours. "Socialist" is little more than a pejorative. I truly wish we had some genuine socialists in the US, not because I support their politics (full disclosure: I'm decidedly to the right and reckon Edmund Burke one of your finest political writers) but because I appreciate their clarity.
The ACA was little more than mandating the purchase of a corporate product, centralizing its sales, and offering subsidies to folks with lower income who don't qualify for the medicare expansion (which is to say, indirectly subsidizing the insurance companies). What we have here are the problems of capitalism combined with the problems of central planning in one system.
Socialists offer a real alternative to this system, and an alternative which is rooted in specific moral principles. I do not agree with all those principles (but chiefly I have a different view of human nature, which is why I'm a conservative) but I can at least come to an understanding with a socialist based upon what principles we share. Our current political landscape seems to be dominated instead by centrist politicians whose chief principles consist in ensuring reelection by satisfying corporate donors. If we had real socialists, at least we could have a real conversation. Since the liberals in this country co-opted the right's plan and passed the ACA, the right has been devoid of any real ideas. The most interesting ideas I've seen on the right have come from distributists, but such get no play in our current political environment.
Turn off adblock. See all those company names that appear when you surf now? Those are the "consumers" of Google's product (i.e. data on you). Well, they and the NSA.
[I]t's another piece of evidence that free-market forces do not necessarily lead to spam filters that are optimal for end users.
Where'd that come from? Last I checked, "free-market forces" weren't capable of programming anything. Programmers do. Nothing's preventing anyone from making a better filter.
The "free-market forces" non-sequitur bespeaks an author with an ax to grind.
You needn't go back to Charles Foster Kane or the William Randolph Hearsts of the world he was meant to represent. This kind of thing never went away (videRupert Murdoch or Ted Turner). The main difference between a Bezos and a Murdoch is that Bezos made his fortune indiscriminately selling books filled with insight, entertainment, truth, facts or lies, while Murdoch was much more discriminate in peddling lies.
Once upon a time, the organs of the body got into a dispute about which was most important.
"Without me," said the eyes, "man couldn't see where his food is."
"Yes," the mouth declared, "but without me he couldn't ingest it."
The hands though this a silly notion. "What good's seeing or ingesting if you can't put it in your mouth?"
"But all your digestion is worthless if I don't pump blood," objected the heart.
"But everything has to obey what I say," said the brain. "So clearly, I'm the most important."
"That's not what the penis tells me," replied the legs.
And so the argument continued back and forth until one organ decided to makes its point. It didn't reason with the others, it merely decided on its own to shut down. It constricted and tightened, and allowed nothing by. Everything was stopped up. The the digestive track stopped working. The heart had no nutrients to pump. The legs and arms had no strength left. The brain suffered a horrible headache and the eyes couldn't see straight. At last they all surrendered and admitted this one organ was really in charge.
What organ, you ask? Why the sphincter. Which goes to show that to be in charge you needn't be the smartest, have the best sight, the longest reach, or good taste. The only thing you need to be in charge is to be an asshole.
Good point. I didn't realize hoarding was so bad in BTC. Your comment sent me off on a tangent to this article and it appears you're quite correct on that account. Even so, my question was intended as mostly hypothetical (hence the "some even slight"). It seems that if there's only a slight amount in circulation, the deflationary effects of any of the circulating currency being removed from the market (via seizure by authorities unable to crack the encryption) would have an amplified effect.
Authorities do not act against the banks in a major way for fear of the effects it might have on the market should one of the banks fail in consequence. If an authority wishes to seize private assets, however, they needn't worry about the deflationary effects of seizing currency since they'll easily come up with ways of getting that back into circulation. I'm just pondering whether encrypted and inaccessible-to-authorities-currency might not in some conceivable future be its own miniature too-big-too-fail.
There's a far greater chance that I don't understand Bitcoin. I have in mind a scenario where the authorities seize fairly large quantities of the currency and permanently remove it from circulation on account of their inability to crack the encryption. Permanently removing any currency, from greenbacks to gold, would have a deflationary effect since it would decrease the monetary supply relative to the supply of available goods and services. Put differently, the relative scarcity of the currency would mean that the price of goods and services in that currency would decrease. All this assumes, of course, that the currency in question could in fact be exchanged for goods and services.
My question chiefly regards what, if any, guards BTC has against such effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... I didn't say using Vatican as a metonym was wrong. I only object to doing so when it's anachronistic, especially in what purports to be a work about history. It's like talking about the American war for independence as a battle between Washington D.C. and London.
The language does not become richer by the sloppy use of poetic language. In fact, I agree with Orwell in "Politics and the English Language" that using figures of speech after we've lost a sense of the what the figure indicates does not enrich the language so much as it impoverishes thought.
NP. I get info so often from folks on Slashdot (I'm only an amateur nerd, not a professional) that I'm always excited to share about things closer to my own specialty.
People are sloppy in the use of the term "Vatican". A good example of this is in one of the sorriest books written by a modern, professional historian. The author constantly and annoyingly uses "Vatican" as a metonym for the papacy when talking about a period centuries before anyone would have so employed the term.
Yes, they have what amounts to a paper shawl, though I don't recall what they charge for it. When we visited, my wife and I were familiar with the dress code and since her shoulders were covered it wasn't an issue for us. We did loan her head-covering to a young lady, however, who used it as a shawl to get through without buying the paper version.
Or that Catholics do believe the papacy because of the Donation of Constantine. It was a Catholic priest who identified the forgery, and that over five centuries ago. Anyone who thinks this is a challenge to Catholic beliefs doesn't understand Catholicism.
There's nothing particularly Byzantine about that letter that looks like a "C". It's called a lunate sigma and it's been around since the Hellenistic period. And the scripts written in the crypts are not miniscule; they're very decidedly majuscule. One is rather unlikely to find Greek written in miniscule in a 2nd-4th c. Roman catacomb, given that Greek miniscule would not be invented for another five centuries.
Now, if you happen to have a little Greek, you might have come to the conclusion that these scripts must be Byzantine since your Attic Greek textbook uses letters that look quite different. But the fact is that modern printed Greek, whether classical, koine, or Byzantine, uses a post-classical script. With the invention of printing, printers created a miniscule script similar to that found in the Byzantine manuscripts they were using. Unless you're working specifically on paleography, none of your textbooks or printed editions are going to use a classical script.
What's wrong with that? Since the law is his idea, we should blame it on Schumer.
In this at least, academia had it right and the rest of society has it wrong.
The traditions of the academy stem from outdated (medieval) notions of freedom. Colleges are supposed to be collegiate, as groups of free scholars able to speak their minds freely. The university administration should serve the colleges and if the administration is corrupt then the scholars owe it to the institution and to their students to object. Otherwise, there is no check on the administration.
Professors should not be mere employees. (Of course, as you'll see, I don't think anyone is or should be a mere employee.) They ought to be members of a guild, granted the right to teach freely because they're recognized and accepted by their peers. Anything less and they become mere proletariat, providing their labor to a large institution which claims the right to fire them at whim.
Now, I say all this recognizing that de facto faculty are mere employees. For this reason, I've even argued that faculty ought to unionize. If we can't have the guild, at least we can have the union to offset the power of our employer.
Lest one should say this thinking makes me "entitled" because I'm an academic, as though that were something special, I would say this again: the rest of society has it wrong. Your employer does not own you. You are a free man or a free woman. If you perform your duties diligently, the duties you've promised to perform by agreement, you ought to be remunerated. Beyond this, they have no claim on you. It is a crime against the freedom and dignity of people that we've allowed employers to command our lives outside that time we've given them in exchange for payment. It is a great loss that we've reduced our notion of freedom to a mere matter of politics, while allowing employment organizational charts to dictate our lives in ways we would never tolerate from government.
Sitting here in an academic library, a janitor just walked by and wiped off the table next to me. So long as he continues to wipe off tables when he is obligated to do so, he ought in spare time to be able to call me, the university president, or the president of the United States a useless layabout.
I would propose that our notion of freedom extend beyond mere politics. I would submit that employers do not own their employees and that work is not the most important aspect of life. And while I am at it, I would close down everything but essential services on Thanksgiving day. The medieval peasant had more holidays than the modern proletariat. I've grown tired of the implication that longer hours away from loved ones, serving some robber baron who will leave one jobless and destitute for speaking ill of him, can be called progress
So, yes, I am an academic. I claim certain anachronistic rights and I wish only the same for you. /anachronisticrant
One of the interesting points the speaker made concerned exactly this. If more of scholarship turned toward open access, libraries could shift money from paying for subscriptions to supporting journals or journal mirrors. They'd likely save considerable cash doing so. More importantly, they'd retain their function as a repository of knowledge, a function increasingly challenged by the presses.
Indeed. But in principle, there's no reason peer review cannot also occur in an online open access journal. In fact, such things already exist. (Work by NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World highlights the potential of this.)
The big hurdle is one of prestige. Publishers hold the prestige for now. Being published is a means of getting the bragging rights necessary to get a job, tenure, and promotion. But the only thing that really gives the publishers such prestige is the voluntary efforts of generations of scholars doing peer-review. The sooner scholars realize that they themselves are the real basis for scholarly prestige, the better.
Last week I spoke at an academic conference where another scholar argued for the use of open-access, open-data journals in our field. With a representative of one of the major university presses sitting right next to him, he made the bold (and correct) argument that the presses were attempting to control content going forward, even if it means strangling libraries and stifling scholarly production. He treated open-access publication as a question of scholarly freedom.
He was completely misunderstood.
As an historian among historians, I expected some resistance to any suggestion that scholarly practices should change. In at least one sense of the word, we're a conservative bunch. But the objections which were raised made me consider a career change. I may as well be a paleontologist if I'm going to walk among living dinosaurs. Nothing's free, one opined, as someone has to pay for the servers. Never mind that our presenter wasn't speaking of cost. We're in a golden age of plagiarism, said another, and this would make things worse. Never mind that we're actually in a golden age of catching plagiarists. A third worried that the ability to search for a keyword in a document would mean people wouldn't read the larger context in which the keyword appears. I can't help but imagining this individual using a razor blade on the indices of her student's textbooks.
Between embargoes, copyright restrictions, and the extraordinary expense libraries have to accept to keep subscription, scholarship is suffering when it ought to be flourishing. Of all people, we in the humanities ought to recognize this fact (last I heard, academic libraries tend to spend around 70-80% of their budgets on science and medicine journals, the rest going to facilities, staff, and last of all humanities). But there I watched a generation of scholars fail utterly to see the copyrighted text on the wall. A shift to open-access is the future of scholarship, but it will take a generation before it can happen. Rather, I should say it will take two generations. The first, mine, will publish in open peer-reviewed journals but not exclusively. We know we need to publish in the older titles if we want jobs and tenure. But once we're in place, we'll be able to accept open journals for their potential, recognizing the value of the next generation's publications in quality open journals.
Spoken like a textbook publisher wanting a contract with the Texas school board.
Well, not yet anyway. I'm sure we'll see ever more proposals to support 'competition, innovation, and free market principles by offering premium and economy broadband packages,' or something like that, from TimeWarner, Comcast, and the like.
Maybe Google figured out it could better monetize Android using product placement.
I look forward to Android 5.8, Eli Lily Brand Insulin Shot (TM).
As any good Marxist will tell you, unions will not get you to socialism (unless they rather suddenly go revolutionary). They will get you to neoliberalism. The problem is that their interests are tied to those of their industrialist employers. They want a bigger slice of the pie but, ultimately, they also want to maintain the system that keeps them fed.
Unions take a rather conservative (in the looser sense of the term) approach to the labor issue. They're content to have the capitalist own the capital. They only ask that labor get a more equitable share of the revenue. This is not the case with a genuine socialist.
If you want an understanding of what "socialist" means in American political discourse (I'm guessing you're from the old country, given your sig and your spelling conventions), then search sometime for "AM talk radio" and listen in for a few hours. "Socialist" is little more than a pejorative. I truly wish we had some genuine socialists in the US, not because I support their politics (full disclosure: I'm decidedly to the right and reckon Edmund Burke one of your finest political writers) but because I appreciate their clarity.
The ACA was little more than mandating the purchase of a corporate product, centralizing its sales, and offering subsidies to folks with lower income who don't qualify for the medicare expansion (which is to say, indirectly subsidizing the insurance companies). What we have here are the problems of capitalism combined with the problems of central planning in one system.
Socialists offer a real alternative to this system, and an alternative which is rooted in specific moral principles. I do not agree with all those principles (but chiefly I have a different view of human nature, which is why I'm a conservative) but I can at least come to an understanding with a socialist based upon what principles we share. Our current political landscape seems to be dominated instead by centrist politicians whose chief principles consist in ensuring reelection by satisfying corporate donors. If we had real socialists, at least we could have a real conversation. Since the liberals in this country co-opted the right's plan and passed the ACA, the right has been devoid of any real ideas. The most interesting ideas I've seen on the right have come from distributists, but such get no play in our current political environment.
After that explosion, it's hard to remember anything really.
Turn off adblock. See all those company names that appear when you surf now? Those are the "consumers" of Google's product (i.e. data on you). Well, they and the NSA.
It's "Don't Be Evil." No one said anything about "Don't Buy Evil."
Where'd that come from? Last I checked, "free-market forces" weren't capable of programming anything. Programmers do. Nothing's preventing anyone from making a better filter.
The "free-market forces" non-sequitur bespeaks an author with an ax to grind.
You needn't go back to Charles Foster Kane or the William Randolph Hearsts of the world he was meant to represent. This kind of thing never went away (vide Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner). The main difference between a Bezos and a Murdoch is that Bezos made his fortune indiscriminately selling books filled with insight, entertainment, truth, facts or lies, while Murdoch was much more discriminate in peddling lies.
Once upon a time, the organs of the body got into a dispute about which was most important.
"Without me," said the eyes, "man couldn't see where his food is."
"Yes," the mouth declared, "but without me he couldn't ingest it."
The hands though this a silly notion. "What good's seeing or ingesting if you can't put it in your mouth?"
"But all your digestion is worthless if I don't pump blood," objected the heart.
"But everything has to obey what I say," said the brain. "So clearly, I'm the most important."
"That's not what the penis tells me," replied the legs.
And so the argument continued back and forth until one organ decided to makes its point. It didn't reason with the others, it merely decided on its own to shut down. It constricted and tightened, and allowed nothing by. Everything was stopped up. The the digestive track stopped working. The heart had no nutrients to pump. The legs and arms had no strength left. The brain suffered a horrible headache and the eyes couldn't see straight. At last they all surrendered and admitted this one organ was really in charge.
What organ, you ask? Why the sphincter. Which goes to show that to be in charge you needn't be the smartest, have the best sight, the longest reach, or good taste. The only thing you need to be in charge is to be an asshole.
Good point. I didn't realize hoarding was so bad in BTC. Your comment sent me off on a tangent to this article and it appears you're quite correct on that account. Even so, my question was intended as mostly hypothetical (hence the "some even slight"). It seems that if there's only a slight amount in circulation, the deflationary effects of any of the circulating currency being removed from the market (via seizure by authorities unable to crack the encryption) would have an amplified effect.
Authorities do not act against the banks in a major way for fear of the effects it might have on the market should one of the banks fail in consequence. If an authority wishes to seize private assets, however, they needn't worry about the deflationary effects of seizing currency since they'll easily come up with ways of getting that back into circulation. I'm just pondering whether encrypted and inaccessible-to-authorities-currency might not in some conceivable future be its own miniature too-big-too-fail.
There's a far greater chance that I don't understand Bitcoin. I have in mind a scenario where the authorities seize fairly large quantities of the currency and permanently remove it from circulation on account of their inability to crack the encryption. Permanently removing any currency, from greenbacks to gold, would have a deflationary effect since it would decrease the monetary supply relative to the supply of available goods and services. Put differently, the relative scarcity of the currency would mean that the price of goods and services in that currency would decrease. All this assumes, of course, that the currency in question could in fact be exchanged for goods and services.
My question chiefly regards what, if any, guards BTC has against such effects.
Could seizure by authorities unable to crack encryption have some even slight deflationary effects on Bitcoins?