I think I agree with you, but I was trying to be brief (and your own brevity makes your extension a bit unclear). If I do understand you properly, then I would actually go farther and say that we have already gotten to the crisis point. The rise in international terrorism and increasing violence directed against police are just two of the most prominent symptoms of the spreading revolt.
My short response is that change is going to happen. I prefer evolutionary change over revolutionary change, but that's just my personal preference. Change cannot be stopped, no matter how much some people prefer it would.
I agree with you that this would be extremely difficult, but I sort of imagine that this would be a kind of prestigious assignment, so they would be able to pick the pool from the best journalists, who might agree to take turns doing the videos or writing the final versions of the text articles. Even though there would be no competitive advantage between the news outlets, there would still be a lot of visibility to the individuals who handled these stories, nasty stories though they be.
Then again, the notion of "impartial journalism" is a kind of fantasy. I think it was mostly created by classical liberal delusions, but the reality before and after, and mostly during, too, was that journalists cannot be impartial, but only pretend to impartiality. Each of us has to have a viewpoint before viewing anything. Perhaps "fairness" was a more realistic objective, but I think FAUX "news" has buried that one pretty deep.
Bookmarked NakedCapitalism and will study it later, but Goldman Sachs is not what I would regard as a positive influence on anything. One of the lessons of Too Big to Fail was the futility and incompetent greed of Goldman Sachs and its alumni. (More interesting was the irrelevance and futility of Dubya in even recognizing one of his most miserable failures.)
Looks bleaker for Killing the Host, though I like the title. My local library doesn't have it, and I will absolutely NEVER again do business with Amazon if there is ANY earthly (or imaginary) alternative. You don't want to get me started on that topic, but if you somehow feel that you owe me ANY sort of favor, you can certainly pay it back in full by buying a book elsewhere.
Hmm... I really can't imagine that I have created the best and ultimate expression of those ideas, but I also admit that I have been unable to find any cohesive study of the area of time-based economics. I can point at certain books such as Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz as quite interesting and closely related, but overall it has been difficult to find much, and I've been looking for several years.
The notion of getting cited or attributed makes it sound like I was some sort of authority on the topic, but I'm just another amateur philosopher trying to understand a few things. I guess the key question underlying ekronomics is "How much money would you pay to continue living?" Perhaps the ultimate answer is "All of it"?
And yet no one can buy infinite life, while the conventional economists mostly ignore the topic, leaving it to the accountants and executors. I actually considered approaching the topic in reverse via fiction. Hemingway may have been right about deeper truths revealed via fiction... Know anyone who might be willing and able to write some stories about the Cryocide Crybabies?
Rather than attributing these ideas to me, I'd prefer to find an attribution to someone who has really developed the ideas? I don't think I'm much of an original thinker. I'm just trying to see what is "intuitively obvious to the most casual observer", but the problem is that people misread that as the idiom, when you should take it literally. There is only one most casual observer, and it usually isn't me. That degree of detachment is the key. Your handle suggests you might appreciate that detachment.
Well, now I think you're moving into a different part of ekronomics. It's touched upon in the "Ekronomics 101" journal entry, but I'll try to summarize it (even more briefly) here. First, it seems that I need to clarify that I am absolutely NOT arguing for some kind of wage equality, which seems to be part of the premise of your response (but I think it is a sincere misperception in your case, not a straw man assumption). (The underlying problem is that there are an infinite number of things that any post is not mentioning?)
My position is that compensation should be in some sense "normalized" based on the ways that people want to spend their time, but there are several constraints that need to be balanced against each other. One obvious constraint is that the salaries for essential work need to be high enough to insure that the essential work gets done. Another constraint is that there should be a premium for less desirable work. There are various other constraints, but that's enough for a first example that someone who actually enjoys doing essential work that other people hate should properly benefit from a major income premium. That might well be based on a different time equation, but the speculative one of retiring at a younger age.
The long comment modifier is configurable. I have it set to give a bonus to long comments, you apparently have it set to penalise them.
Spent a while wandering around in the Options and Account section and couldn't find such a setting. Also tried to find a setting place out of the comments section, but without success. Where is this setting?
Thanks for that information. I'll search in the settings again. I sure don't remember it, but I haven't searched the settings recently. Maybe the last time was a sig tweak...
However (or by the way?), I've been thinking of another suggestion to improve the quality of discussions on slashdot. Is there some ongoing venue within slashdot for that sort of thing? As far as I know now, the least transient place might be my own journal pages, but it's not likely it would have much impact or influence there... Basically trying to avert insincere trollage. (My basic position is that "troll" is a multidimensional concept, but the (nagative) sincerity dimension is the most annoying aspect of a troll, and there is a way to let the trolls shoot themselves in the tongue.
Well, I have to congratulate you on your interpretive skills, but if that is the sort of stuff he normally writes, then I certainly don't miss the opportunity to engage in dialog with him.
Not sure if you are asking whether or not I would agree with his interpretation (as you have interpreted it), but I think I could reply that well developed societies are entering a kind of crisis of hyper-productivity. If you just consider the essential work required to keep society running, then considering the demographic data (especially for work categories), it seems we only need about 2 hours per week for the essential work, if you averaged it over the entire population. If that estimate is approximately correct and we go with 40 hour work weeks as a basis, then 19 people could survive as long as one person is working full time. In that sense, the other 19 people represent discretionary time, and the interesting question is how their time is divided between investment and recreation...
In contrast, in a relatively poor society, most people may be working 40 hours per week and just barely keeping afloat. There may be almost no time available for investment and recreation. Then in the even worse case of an extremely poor society, such as a hunter-gatherer society or failed state, everyone may spend every waking hour struggling to survive and barely succeeding half the time.
Really? Are you certain who owned each of the companies you worked for?
Since I'm not sure what your actual point was supposed to be, I feel like I can go off on a tangent that is related to VCs, though I'm not going to focus on them. Yes, I have read a number of books in which VCs were the villains. As far as I can remember, that was always due to their bottomless love of money. The last such book was probably about Twitter, but I think Twitter was a terrible idea from the git go, so I don't want to blame the VCs for the awfulness in that case, but turning to more recent books...
Recently read Too Big to Fail and Barbarians at the Gate, which were both centrally focused around the games money-lovers play. The interesting aspect is that they were playing from opposite sides of the delusions. The big banks created fake profits that inflated their stock prices, producing fantasy-based market caps. When reality struck back, the entire financial system was almost destroyed. In contrast, the stock price of RJR Nabisco was delusionally low, which gave Ross Johnson the idea of essentially stealing the company with an LBO at $75/share, only to be destroyed by more creative money grubbers who were able to price it at $110/share and kick him out.
In the context of this slashdot article, the point is that none of them are actually doing anything to create real value for anyone. Don't remember the details for VCs, but in the other books the love of gambling was a common theme.
What are you talking about? That is a sincere request for you to write more clearly. Since your comment is a reply, it would seem that you think that you are writing something that is related to something that I wrote, but I cannot find it. You seem simply incoherent. (Are you perhaps a Trump voter?)
If you could not understand some aspect of what I wrote, then you might begin by asking for clarification of that aspect.
If you could not understand ANY aspect of what I wrote, but you want to take the discussion in some new direction, then you probably need to put your comment somewhere else or at least start by explaining why you think it belongs here or has some relationship to something I wrote there.
At this point, about all I can say is that I think I'm supposed to be polite and reply, but I can't find anything there to reply to. Maybe you're trying to say that some people are lazy, but if so, perhaps you should be less lazy in explaining your position?
The long comment negative modifier is stupid. While it would be nice to have a warning, it is fundamentally stupid to apply pressure to fit EVERY idea into any small package size if you prefer that more people be able to see it.
What if there is NO work that actually needs to be done? Why should people be forced to work just so that filthy rich bastards like Robert Greenstein can get a little more money that he doesn't actually need?
The ekronomic answer is threefold:
(1) The nonessential investment work that they willingly do will help reduce the required amounts of essential work in the future, which is basically a nice thing. (No insult intended to the people who enjoy doing the essential work and more power to them. Actually, they are lucky to enjoy doing what needs to be done anyway.)
(2) The nonessential recreational work on the creative side will remain as bottomless as ever. Still not possible to force anyone to do it.
(3) The nonessential recreational work on the consumption side also remains as bottomless as ever, and they also serve who only sit on the couch and consume entertainment. However, if they have some money to spend, then it's an important metric what sort of entertainment they want.
What greedy bastards like Robert Greenstein can't understand is that ambitious people will be ambitious no matter what, and those ambitious people will eagerly invest their time in increasing their own personal productivity (rather than recreation). Creative people will be creative no matter what, and if they can get paid enough money to survive longer, then they will eagerly create more things (without wasting precious creative time on grunge work).
It is ONLY the money-loving greedy bastards like himself who desperately need to get more money no matter what. From Robert Greenstein's perspective, slavery is just as good as anything else that gives him the same amount of money. Unfortunately, his personal problem is fundamentally unsolvable because there is NO amount of money that is sufficient.
No, that is not what I said at all. Either you are intellectually dishonest or you have a reading disability. I feel sorry for you in either case, but you have convinced me there is no reason to continue this conversation. Congratulations.
Now THAT is more like today's worthless slashdot as I have come to expect it.
I feel like I'm being unclear. I am absolutely NOT saying that the criminals are not heinous monsters. I am saying we should NOT play the game by the monsters' preferred rules. We can change the rules against them.
Let me try to reword it:
If a story is classified as "disaster porn created for free publicity" (which would include almost every terrorist attack), then that news story would be transferred to a special pool of reporters. They would produce unified reports that would be shared with all responsible news organizations. There would be no additional free coverage for the terrorists, and no competition for eyeballs, since that story would be reported in the same way everywhere. Some news organizations might choose to give it less time, but that would be their decision.
Rather than trying to make money from supporting the terrorists, the news organizations would be incentivized to compete on everything else. Only the fake news deliberately created for free publicity would be subject to "equalization".
I don't want to go too far into speculative details, but I think the special pool should be staffed by experienced reporters from all of the news organizations, probably serving on relatively short rotations. I also think there should be a protest mechanism, if some of the news organizations feel that a news story or some aspects of a news story should not be limited to the special "disaster porn" pool.
I didn't say anything about Congress in this reply or the earlier one, so it's really hard to regard your response as sincere or in good faith, but I'll go ahead and pretend for a bit that there is some potential for a civil discussion today's slashdot.
If you want to raise the NEW question of legislative mandate, I would say it could fit under the "public good" idea that was part of the licensing of the airwaves by AM radio stations way back when. It was explicitly required that they serve the public good in exchange for being granted what were essentially monopoly rights for the use of certain frequencies. I think that was actually a good thing and probably contributed to some good things in America in more democratic days. More "politically representative" days if you have been indoctrinated to hate the other word.
What I am suggesting would basically be an agreement among the major news broadcasters NOT to compete for eyeballs by using disaster porn that was created for that purpose. All of them would agree to use the SAME coverage. If a news story was classified as "artificial disaster porn seeking free publicity", then that story would be handed over to a special group of reporters who would cover the story on behalf of ALL of the responsible news organizations. Because they would have access to the same coverage, they would not be competing for eyeballs on that story, and they would not have the incentive to make it bigger and better, which is exactly what the terrorists want.
How to staff the special group is a good question. I think that there should be a special pool of experienced reporters assigned from all of the news organizations. However, it might make good sense to have some of them be permanent employees of the special pool.
Still don't see any need for government involvement, though it might make sense to reward the media organizations that participate with a special tax credit, or put a special terrorist-support surtax on the media organizations that refuse to participate.
Per my longer suggestion in an earlier reply, we can protect the First Amendment without playing the game on the terrorists' rules. The responsible and mainstream mass media should agree to stop competing for eyeballs by giving the terrorists free publicity. Instead, they will only report the same standard stories about the terrorists, and therefore have no economic incentive to help the terrorists. Instead the economic incentive will actually be reversed in favor of real news rather than fake news created by terrorists only for the sake of getting the free publicity.
(See the longer reply for more about one way this could be done.)
Kind of surprised to see something along the lines of an insightful discussion on today's slashdot, so I'll give a shot to answering the question (since I haven't found such an answer yet). It's actually an economic model that could be of interest to slashdot, insofar as slashdot is some sort of journalistic enterprise.
Solution: STOP supporting the terrorists with FREE publicity. I'm not saying that the journalists shouldn't report the terrorist incidents, but they need to stop using deliberate publicity-seeking disaster porn as part of their business model. The never-ending quest for more eyeballs to sell more ads is giving the advantage to the terrorists. The more outrageous the terrorist act, the more free publicity and the HARDER the mass media works to give the terrorists more free publicity. In case you haven't noticed, it is NOT discouraging the terrorists from trying to devise ever more horrendous attacks.
Instead, ALL of the responsible mainstream media sources should agree NOT to compete for eyeballs with disaster porn produced by terrorists. The reports of terrorist incidents should be unified and limited. They should form a special consortium to prepare the reports on terrorists incidents, and all of the media sources would only broadcast the SAME stories about the terrorist acts. The stories would avoid sensationalism and simply report the terrible facts. Each media source could use all of the reports, or some of them, but it would not be a competition for eyeballs for terrorists. Actually, the incentives would now be reversed, and all of the media sources would be motivated to produce more news about other stories so they can compete for those precious eyeballs--but without helping or encouraging the terrorists.
Free publicity is an oxymoron. It is incredibly valuable. Just ask the Donald.
The VP pick is the first truly binding presidential decision. At it's most basic, it can tell you if the presidential candidate is more concerned about politics or the best interests of the country. That's why it can be hurtful to make a purely political pick of a totally unqualified person. No one can be absolutely certain that he is going to live four more days, let alone four years.
A terrible and obviously unqualified VP pick should be absolutely disqualifying for a candidate, but obviously it isn't. Dan Quayle has already been mentioned, and even the Sarah Palin pick didn't destroy McCain's candidacy. Actually, I think the Dan Quayle pick may have been part of a long-term plan to make Dubya look qualified for the job--and now we have the Donald.
I think you have hit the nail on the head, but I hit it first (or maybe 17th after seeing it on Twitter). Trump does NOT really want to be president. He wants to be EX-president with the giant brand value. Trump actually thinks Nixon was a chump for not milking the cash after his pardon. Here is the Donald's REAL plan.
1. Get the nomination. Easy to fool some of the people all of the time. 2. Pick a VP who loves Ford's pardon of Nixon. 3. Win the election. Only has to fool most (51%) of the people on some of the days (one election day, to be precise). 4. Be himself. Start some wars, bankrupt the country, whatever. Get impeached, resign, get pardoned. 5. PROFIT.
If Scott Adams is right with his glide slope comment, then we are seriously phucked now and we just have to pray that Trump's selfishness will keep him from blowing up the country, even though he could just hop on one of his private jets and fly to one of his other houses. I hope that Adams is delusional, because the other hope of Trump's secret super-patriotism is too forlorn, even for me.
Thanks for the correction, but I couldn't find anything along the lines of ekronomics in his recent posts. So I decided to look at his journal instead and he immediately blew his credibility. As usual, I want to find a constructive approach, so it seems to call for a slightly longer intro to what I regard as ekronomics. These are just a few of the areas I've been thinking of.
The essential notion of ekronomics is that time is much more important than money and needs to be analyzed carefully. Focusing on working time, there are three basic kinds: (1) essential time to produce (and sustain) the goods and services we need to survive, (2) investment time that improves the productivity (equals reducing the required amount of essential time), and (3) recreational time, which actually includes both the production and consumption of recreational goods and services such as music, novels, and movies. That's not to say the division is always easy, but I think that's where we need to start. An obvious example of a complexity is education. A certain amount of education is essential to sustain any society, but the rest of it has to divided between investment and recreation time, and that's going to take some thought.
One application involves comparing national development. In a developed country (where almost all of the members of slashdot live) the productivity is high and the amount of time is low. Based on productivity figures that I've read and the demographic categories of the working population, I estimate that the value is on the order of 2 hours per week, averaged over the entire population. Remember that some people spend all of their working time in the essential work while other people are not doing any of it, but just buying what they need based on other work they are doing. In contrast, in a less developed society, almost everyone may be working 40 hours per work just to grow the food, while in the least developed societies (such as hunter-gatherer tribes or failed states) people may spend all of their time just struggling to survive. Looking at the future trend of national development from an ekronomic perspective, it is the balance between the other two categories that is crucial. If two countries start at the same level, but one country guides more time into investment while the other allows more time to be spent on recreation, then the first country is pretty sure to wind up more productive. Perhaps Singapore is an interesting example of this approach?
Another application involves determining proper and appropriate salary levels. From an ekronomic perspective, it is reasonable to try to evaluate jobs in terms of the amount of time people want to spend on them. I haven't yet been able to find much hard data in this area, but the research approach is obvious. You would ask a large number of people who have worked in different areas how they feel about the two kinds of jobs. A simple example question would be "How many hours of typing would you prefer instead of 1 hour of collecting garbage?" Of course the results will vary widely from person to person, but the averages will give a reasonable indicator of the desirability of different types of work and what the proper salary differentials ought to be, though you have to adjust for other factors, such as the educational time (investment time) required to qualify for the work and the prioritization of essential work. However, if you come to the conclusion that garbage collectors deserve relatively high pay and you happen to be a person who actually enjoys collecting garbage, then more power (and pay) to you and other people are unlikely to complain that they can use more of their time in other ways.
Recreational time is interesting in several ways. As a quasi-joke, I wrote a piece called "Couch potatoes of the world, unite." The URL is http://eco-epistemology.blogsp... and that was back in 2013, so I've been thinking about these ideas for a while... The i
I'll have to see I can find what he's up to. My analysis begins with work in the three categories of essential, investment, and recreational. Ring any bells?
Slashdot Mirror
I think I agree with you, but I was trying to be brief (and your own brevity makes your extension a bit unclear). If I do understand you properly, then I would actually go farther and say that we have already gotten to the crisis point. The rise in international terrorism and increasing violence directed against police are just two of the most prominent symptoms of the spreading revolt.
My short response is that change is going to happen. I prefer evolutionary change over revolutionary change, but that's just my personal preference. Change cannot be stopped, no matter how much some people prefer it would.
I agree with you that this would be extremely difficult, but I sort of imagine that this would be a kind of prestigious assignment, so they would be able to pick the pool from the best journalists, who might agree to take turns doing the videos or writing the final versions of the text articles. Even though there would be no competitive advantage between the news outlets, there would still be a lot of visibility to the individuals who handled these stories, nasty stories though they be.
Then again, the notion of "impartial journalism" is a kind of fantasy. I think it was mostly created by classical liberal delusions, but the reality before and after, and mostly during, too, was that journalists cannot be impartial, but only pretend to impartiality. Each of us has to have a viewpoint before viewing anything. Perhaps "fairness" was a more realistic objective, but I think FAUX "news" has buried that one pretty deep.
Bookmarked NakedCapitalism and will study it later, but Goldman Sachs is not what I would regard as a positive influence on anything. One of the lessons of Too Big to Fail was the futility and incompetent greed of Goldman Sachs and its alumni. (More interesting was the irrelevance and futility of Dubya in even recognizing one of his most miserable failures.)
Looks bleaker for Killing the Host , though I like the title. My local library doesn't have it, and I will absolutely NEVER again do business with Amazon if there is ANY earthly (or imaginary) alternative. You don't want to get me started on that topic, but if you somehow feel that you owe me ANY sort of favor, you can certainly pay it back in full by buying a book elsewhere.
Hmm... I really can't imagine that I have created the best and ultimate expression of those ideas, but I also admit that I have been unable to find any cohesive study of the area of time-based economics. I can point at certain books such as Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz as quite interesting and closely related, but overall it has been difficult to find much, and I've been looking for several years.
The notion of getting cited or attributed makes it sound like I was some sort of authority on the topic, but I'm just another amateur philosopher trying to understand a few things. I guess the key question underlying ekronomics is "How much money would you pay to continue living?" Perhaps the ultimate answer is "All of it"?
And yet no one can buy infinite life, while the conventional economists mostly ignore the topic, leaving it to the accountants and executors. I actually considered approaching the topic in reverse via fiction. Hemingway may have been right about deeper truths revealed via fiction... Know anyone who might be willing and able to write some stories about the Cryocide Crybabies?
Rather than attributing these ideas to me, I'd prefer to find an attribution to someone who has really developed the ideas? I don't think I'm much of an original thinker. I'm just trying to see what is "intuitively obvious to the most casual observer", but the problem is that people misread that as the idiom, when you should take it literally. There is only one most casual observer, and it usually isn't me. That degree of detachment is the key. Your handle suggests you might appreciate that detachment.
Well, now I think you're moving into a different part of ekronomics. It's touched upon in the "Ekronomics 101" journal entry, but I'll try to summarize it (even more briefly) here. First, it seems that I need to clarify that I am absolutely NOT arguing for some kind of wage equality, which seems to be part of the premise of your response (but I think it is a sincere misperception in your case, not a straw man assumption). (The underlying problem is that there are an infinite number of things that any post is not mentioning?)
My position is that compensation should be in some sense "normalized" based on the ways that people want to spend their time, but there are several constraints that need to be balanced against each other. One obvious constraint is that the salaries for essential work need to be high enough to insure that the essential work gets done. Another constraint is that there should be a premium for less desirable work. There are various other constraints, but that's enough for a first example that someone who actually enjoys doing essential work that other people hate should properly benefit from a major income premium. That might well be based on a different time equation, but the speculative one of retiring at a younger age.
The long comment modifier is configurable. I have it set to give a bonus to long comments, you apparently have it set to penalise them.
Spent a while wandering around in the Options and Account section and couldn't find such a setting. Also tried to find a setting place out of the comments section, but without success. Where is this setting?
Thanks for that information. I'll search in the settings again. I sure don't remember it, but I haven't searched the settings recently. Maybe the last time was a sig tweak...
However (or by the way?), I've been thinking of another suggestion to improve the quality of discussions on slashdot. Is there some ongoing venue within slashdot for that sort of thing? As far as I know now, the least transient place might be my own journal pages, but it's not likely it would have much impact or influence there... Basically trying to avert insincere trollage. (My basic position is that "troll" is a multidimensional concept, but the (nagative) sincerity dimension is the most annoying aspect of a troll, and there is a way to let the trolls shoot themselves in the tongue.
Well, I have to congratulate you on your interpretive skills, but if that is the sort of stuff he normally writes, then I certainly don't miss the opportunity to engage in dialog with him.
Not sure if you are asking whether or not I would agree with his interpretation (as you have interpreted it), but I think I could reply that well developed societies are entering a kind of crisis of hyper-productivity. If you just consider the essential work required to keep society running, then considering the demographic data (especially for work categories), it seems we only need about 2 hours per week for the essential work, if you averaged it over the entire population. If that estimate is approximately correct and we go with 40 hour work weeks as a basis, then 19 people could survive as long as one person is working full time. In that sense, the other 19 people represent discretionary time, and the interesting question is how their time is divided between investment and recreation...
In contrast, in a relatively poor society, most people may be working 40 hours per week and just barely keeping afloat. There may be almost no time available for investment and recreation. Then in the even worse case of an extremely poor society, such as a hunter-gatherer society or failed state, everyone may spend every waking hour struggling to survive and barely succeeding half the time.
Really? Are you certain who owned each of the companies you worked for?
Since I'm not sure what your actual point was supposed to be, I feel like I can go off on a tangent that is related to VCs, though I'm not going to focus on them. Yes, I have read a number of books in which VCs were the villains. As far as I can remember, that was always due to their bottomless love of money. The last such book was probably about Twitter, but I think Twitter was a terrible idea from the git go, so I don't want to blame the VCs for the awfulness in that case, but turning to more recent books...
Recently read Too Big to Fail and Barbarians at the Gate , which were both centrally focused around the games money-lovers play. The interesting aspect is that they were playing from opposite sides of the delusions. The big banks created fake profits that inflated their stock prices, producing fantasy-based market caps. When reality struck back, the entire financial system was almost destroyed. In contrast, the stock price of RJR Nabisco was delusionally low, which gave Ross Johnson the idea of essentially stealing the company with an LBO at $75/share, only to be destroyed by more creative money grubbers who were able to price it at $110/share and kick him out.
In the context of this slashdot article, the point is that none of them are actually doing anything to create real value for anyone. Don't remember the details for VCs, but in the other books the love of gambling was a common theme.
What are you talking about? That is a sincere request for you to write more clearly. Since your comment is a reply, it would seem that you think that you are writing something that is related to something that I wrote, but I cannot find it. You seem simply incoherent. (Are you perhaps a Trump voter?)
If you could not understand some aspect of what I wrote, then you might begin by asking for clarification of that aspect.
If you could not understand ANY aspect of what I wrote, but you want to take the discussion in some new direction, then you probably need to put your comment somewhere else or at least start by explaining why you think it belongs here or has some relationship to something I wrote there.
At this point, about all I can say is that I think I'm supposed to be polite and reply, but I can't find anything there to reply to. Maybe you're trying to say that some people are lazy, but if so, perhaps you should be less lazy in explaining your position?
The long comment negative modifier is stupid. While it would be nice to have a warning, it is fundamentally stupid to apply pressure to fit EVERY idea into any small package size if you prefer that more people be able to see it.
Then again, I can be verbose sometimes.
https://slashdot.org/journal/2... is an intro to the topic, but to reword it in terms of this article:
What if there is NO work that actually needs to be done? Why should people be forced to work just so that filthy rich bastards like Robert Greenstein can get a little more money that he doesn't actually need?
The ekronomic answer is threefold:
(1) The nonessential investment work that they willingly do will help reduce the required amounts of essential work in the future, which is basically a nice thing. (No insult intended to the people who enjoy doing the essential work and more power to them. Actually, they are lucky to enjoy doing what needs to be done anyway.)
(2) The nonessential recreational work on the creative side will remain as bottomless as ever. Still not possible to force anyone to do it.
(3) The nonessential recreational work on the consumption side also remains as bottomless as ever, and they also serve who only sit on the couch and consume entertainment. However, if they have some money to spend, then it's an important metric what sort of entertainment they want.
What greedy bastards like Robert Greenstein can't understand is that ambitious people will be ambitious no matter what, and those ambitious people will eagerly invest their time in increasing their own personal productivity (rather than recreation). Creative people will be creative no matter what, and if they can get paid enough money to survive longer, then they will eagerly create more things (without wasting precious creative time on grunge work).
It is ONLY the money-loving greedy bastards like himself who desperately need to get more money no matter what. From Robert Greenstein's perspective, slavery is just as good as anything else that gives him the same amount of money. Unfortunately, his personal problem is fundamentally unsolvable because there is NO amount of money that is sufficient.
No, that is not what I wrote, and if you were intellectually honest enough or sincere enough to ask me about it, then I would have told you why.
Instead, I'll just reciprocate your integrity and ask "Why do you support the terrorists?"
Feel free to respond, but I recommend against holding your breath pending a response. I'm interested in intellectual discussions.
No, that is not what I said at all. Either you are intellectually dishonest or you have a reading disability. I feel sorry for you in either case, but you have convinced me there is no reason to continue this conversation. Congratulations.
Now THAT is more like today's worthless slashdot as I have come to expect it.
I feel like I'm being unclear. I am absolutely NOT saying that the criminals are not heinous monsters. I am saying we should NOT play the game by the monsters' preferred rules. We can change the rules against them.
Let me try to reword it:
If a story is classified as "disaster porn created for free publicity" (which would include almost every terrorist attack), then that news story would be transferred to a special pool of reporters. They would produce unified reports that would be shared with all responsible news organizations. There would be no additional free coverage for the terrorists, and no competition for eyeballs, since that story would be reported in the same way everywhere. Some news organizations might choose to give it less time, but that would be their decision.
Rather than trying to make money from supporting the terrorists, the news organizations would be incentivized to compete on everything else. Only the fake news deliberately created for free publicity would be subject to "equalization".
I don't want to go too far into speculative details, but I think the special pool should be staffed by experienced reporters from all of the news organizations, probably serving on relatively short rotations. I also think there should be a protest mechanism, if some of the news organizations feel that a news story or some aspects of a news story should not be limited to the special "disaster porn" pool.
I didn't say anything about Congress in this reply or the earlier one, so it's really hard to regard your response as sincere or in good faith, but I'll go ahead and pretend for a bit that there is some potential for a civil discussion today's slashdot.
If you want to raise the NEW question of legislative mandate, I would say it could fit under the "public good" idea that was part of the licensing of the airwaves by AM radio stations way back when. It was explicitly required that they serve the public good in exchange for being granted what were essentially monopoly rights for the use of certain frequencies. I think that was actually a good thing and probably contributed to some good things in America in more democratic days. More "politically representative" days if you have been indoctrinated to hate the other word.
What I am suggesting would basically be an agreement among the major news broadcasters NOT to compete for eyeballs by using disaster porn that was created for that purpose. All of them would agree to use the SAME coverage. If a news story was classified as "artificial disaster porn seeking free publicity", then that story would be handed over to a special group of reporters who would cover the story on behalf of ALL of the responsible news organizations. Because they would have access to the same coverage, they would not be competing for eyeballs on that story, and they would not have the incentive to make it bigger and better, which is exactly what the terrorists want.
How to staff the special group is a good question. I think that there should be a special pool of experienced reporters assigned from all of the news organizations. However, it might make good sense to have some of them be permanent employees of the special pool.
Still don't see any need for government involvement, though it might make sense to reward the media organizations that participate with a special tax credit, or put a special terrorist-support surtax on the media organizations that refuse to participate.
If I ever got a mod point, I'd give you one for that. Speaking purely hypothetically of course, but I can't decide if it would be funny or insightful.
Per my longer suggestion in an earlier reply, we can protect the First Amendment without playing the game on the terrorists' rules. The responsible and mainstream mass media should agree to stop competing for eyeballs by giving the terrorists free publicity. Instead, they will only report the same standard stories about the terrorists, and therefore have no economic incentive to help the terrorists. Instead the economic incentive will actually be reversed in favor of real news rather than fake news created by terrorists only for the sake of getting the free publicity.
(See the longer reply for more about one way this could be done.)
Kind of surprised to see something along the lines of an insightful discussion on today's slashdot, so I'll give a shot to answering the question (since I haven't found such an answer yet). It's actually an economic model that could be of interest to slashdot, insofar as slashdot is some sort of journalistic enterprise.
Solution: STOP supporting the terrorists with FREE publicity. I'm not saying that the journalists shouldn't report the terrorist incidents, but they need to stop using deliberate publicity-seeking disaster porn as part of their business model. The never-ending quest for more eyeballs to sell more ads is giving the advantage to the terrorists. The more outrageous the terrorist act, the more free publicity and the HARDER the mass media works to give the terrorists more free publicity. In case you haven't noticed, it is NOT discouraging the terrorists from trying to devise ever more horrendous attacks.
Instead, ALL of the responsible mainstream media sources should agree NOT to compete for eyeballs with disaster porn produced by terrorists. The reports of terrorist incidents should be unified and limited. They should form a special consortium to prepare the reports on terrorists incidents, and all of the media sources would only broadcast the SAME stories about the terrorist acts. The stories would avoid sensationalism and simply report the terrible facts. Each media source could use all of the reports, or some of them, but it would not be a competition for eyeballs for terrorists. Actually, the incentives would now be reversed, and all of the media sources would be motivated to produce more news about other stories so they can compete for those precious eyeballs--but without helping or encouraging the terrorists.
Free publicity is an oxymoron. It is incredibly valuable. Just ask the Donald.
The VP pick is the first truly binding presidential decision. At it's most basic, it can tell you if the presidential candidate is more concerned about politics or the best interests of the country. That's why it can be hurtful to make a purely political pick of a totally unqualified person. No one can be absolutely certain that he is going to live four more days, let alone four years.
A terrible and obviously unqualified VP pick should be absolutely disqualifying for a candidate, but obviously it isn't. Dan Quayle has already been mentioned, and even the Sarah Palin pick didn't destroy McCain's candidacy. Actually, I think the Dan Quayle pick may have been part of a long-term plan to make Dubya look qualified for the job--and now we have the Donald.
I'd give you a mod point except I never get any to give. I think I did once, but it must have been 10 years ago or so.
I think you have hit the nail on the head, but I hit it first (or maybe 17th after seeing it on Twitter). Trump does NOT really want to be president. He wants to be EX-president with the giant brand value. Trump actually thinks Nixon was a chump for not milking the cash after his pardon. Here is the Donald's REAL plan.
1. Get the nomination. Easy to fool some of the people all of the time.
2. Pick a VP who loves Ford's pardon of Nixon.
3. Win the election. Only has to fool most (51%) of the people on some of the days (one election day, to be precise).
4. Be himself. Start some wars, bankrupt the country, whatever. Get impeached, resign, get pardoned.
5. PROFIT.
If Scott Adams is right with his glide slope comment, then we are seriously phucked now and we just have to pray that Trump's selfishness will keep him from blowing up the country, even though he could just hop on one of his private jets and fly to one of his other houses. I hope that Adams is delusional, because the other hope of Trump's secret super-patriotism is too forlorn, even for me.
Thanks for the correction, but I couldn't find anything along the lines of ekronomics in his recent posts. So I decided to look at his journal instead and he immediately blew his credibility. As usual, I want to find a constructive approach, so it seems to call for a slightly longer intro to what I regard as ekronomics. These are just a few of the areas I've been thinking of.
The essential notion of ekronomics is that time is much more important than money and needs to be analyzed carefully. Focusing on working time, there are three basic kinds: (1) essential time to produce (and sustain) the goods and services we need to survive, (2) investment time that improves the productivity (equals reducing the required amount of essential time), and (3) recreational time, which actually includes both the production and consumption of recreational goods and services such as music, novels, and movies. That's not to say the division is always easy, but I think that's where we need to start. An obvious example of a complexity is education. A certain amount of education is essential to sustain any society, but the rest of it has to divided between investment and recreation time, and that's going to take some thought.
One application involves comparing national development. In a developed country (where almost all of the members of slashdot live) the productivity is high and the amount of time is low. Based on productivity figures that I've read and the demographic categories of the working population, I estimate that the value is on the order of 2 hours per week, averaged over the entire population. Remember that some people spend all of their working time in the essential work while other people are not doing any of it, but just buying what they need based on other work they are doing. In contrast, in a less developed society, almost everyone may be working 40 hours per work just to grow the food, while in the least developed societies (such as hunter-gatherer tribes or failed states) people may spend all of their time just struggling to survive. Looking at the future trend of national development from an ekronomic perspective, it is the balance between the other two categories that is crucial. If two countries start at the same level, but one country guides more time into investment while the other allows more time to be spent on recreation, then the first country is pretty sure to wind up more productive. Perhaps Singapore is an interesting example of this approach?
Another application involves determining proper and appropriate salary levels. From an ekronomic perspective, it is reasonable to try to evaluate jobs in terms of the amount of time people want to spend on them. I haven't yet been able to find much hard data in this area, but the research approach is obvious. You would ask a large number of people who have worked in different areas how they feel about the two kinds of jobs. A simple example question would be "How many hours of typing would you prefer instead of 1 hour of collecting garbage?" Of course the results will vary widely from person to person, but the averages will give a reasonable indicator of the desirability of different types of work and what the proper salary differentials ought to be, though you have to adjust for other factors, such as the educational time (investment time) required to qualify for the work and the prioritization of essential work. However, if you come to the conclusion that garbage collectors deserve relatively high pay and you happen to be a person who actually enjoys collecting garbage, then more power (and pay) to you and other people are unlikely to complain that they can use more of their time in other ways.
Recreational time is interesting in several ways. As a quasi-joke, I wrote a piece called "Couch potatoes of the world, unite." The URL is http://eco-epistemology.blogsp... and that was back in 2013, so I've been thinking about these ideas for a while... The i
No such user?
I'll have to see I can find what he's up to. My analysis begins with work in the three categories of essential, investment, and recreational. Ring any bells?