Posts Tagged ‘post-scarcity’
Make Mine Monday Links
* Classic SF magazines Galaxy and If are available at Internet Archive.
* …the American employee is increasingly no longer an employee at all, but someone granted the privilege to work by a network administrator, an opportunity just as easily revoked.
* The secret lives of Tumblr teens.
* Emerging Trends in African Speculative Fiction.
* The end of higher education in Illinois. In Pennsylvania.
* A nimble, effective nonprofit corporation must depend on experienced, independent directors able to govern without being compromised; however, it is difficult to justify the NCAA’s tax-exempt status when vast sums of revenue are siphoned off by coaches and athletic administrations. Instead, the NCAA must develop a governance model that is free from those with vested interests, including presidents.
* …because the stakes are so low: “A professor’s post last week to the PLANET Listserv (until now a respected place of discussion for scholars of planning, geography and related fields) set off a debate and led 118 professors to quit the forum on Friday.”
* How We Fooled Donald Trump Into Retweeting Benito Mussolini. Trump and nonsense debt. The Republican Party’s implosion over Donald Trump’s candidacy has arrived. Don’t Assume Conservatives Will Rally Behind Trump. Bialystok and Bloom.
* John Oliver went after Donald Trump for 21 minutes last night.
* Understanding the global warming ‘hiatus.’
* Indian Point Leak Foreshadows the End of the Nuclear Age.
* Stephen Curry Is the Revolution.
* Maryland lawmakers consider banning police ‘rough rides.’ Reeeeeeeeally thinking that one over I guess.
* Now with 68 characters, Infinity War is finally starting to come together.
* The White House Wants To Use Science Fiction To Settle The Solar System. I’m in! Though I feel like maybe we’ve been reading different books.
* A Europe of city-states. I’d like to see a similar map of the U.S.
* Let’s give half the planet back to Nature.
* Evolution and polygamy, by way of Playboy.
* Title IX at the American Association of Law Schools.
* “Why Jean-Luc Picard Never Carried a Wallet.”
* And now, 15 minutes of Worf’s ideas getting shot down by everyone on The Next Generation.
Mondayish Reading
* In the past five years, public universities pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into their sports programs, according to an examination by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. The review included an inflation-adjusted analysis of financial reports provided to the NCAA by 201 public universities competing in Division I, information that was obtained through public-records requests. The average athletic subsidy that these colleges and their students have paid to their athletic departments increased 16 percent during that time. Student fees, which accounted for nearly half of all subsidies, increased by 10 percent.
* Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies.
* TV archive discovers couple who beat Kirk and Uhura to first interracial kiss.
* Marquette is hiring a sustainability coordinator.
* “Why I’m Teaching a Netflix Class.”
* What Do You Have to Make in a Year to be in the Top 1% of Your State?
* The Death and Life of Simulated Cities.
* You could call it Rahm’s revenge—the whole point of passing a more ambitious, more politically risky version of Obamacare was to get enough healthy people to buy coverage, and that’s exactly what hasn’t been happening.
* Syracuse thought that by building a giant highway in the middle of town it could become an economic powerhouse. Instead, it got a bad bout of white flight and the worst slum problem in America. How to Decimate a City.
* On science fiction and post-scarcity economics.
* I suppose I’ve always been ahead of the curve.
* Junot Díaz talk discusses social activism in academia.
* To be sure, anger over Western policies is among the drivers of recruitment for groups like IS, but IS is not a purely reactive organisation: it is a millenarian movement with a distinctly apocalyptic agenda. As Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian diplomat in Paris, points out, ‘One of the most striking things about Islamic State is that it has no demands. All the movements we’ve known, from the Vietcong to the FLN to the Palestinians, had demands: if the occupation ends, if we get independence, the war ends. But Daesh’s project is to eliminate the frontiers of Sykes-Picot. It’s like the Biblical revisionism of the settlers, who invent a history that never existed.’
* Penn State Cancels Recreational Class Trips To NYC & DC Due To “Safety Concerns.”
* Star Wars, before the EU. Alan Moore’s Star Wars. Hang the Jedi.
* A brief history of judicial dissent.
* On Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s racism wasn’t the matter of a few unfortunate remarks here or there. It was a core part of his political identity, as indicated both by his anti-black policies as president and by his writings before taking office. It is completely accurate to describe him as a racist and white supremacist and condemn him accordingly.
* The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.
* Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness.
* What was it like to be a Nintendo game play counselor?
* Antonin Scalia, fraud, part 87.
* The rise of “white student unions.” They’re probably fake.
* Use of High-Tech Brooms Divides Low-Tech Sport of Curling.
* When administrations co-opt student movements, Duke edition. Also at Duke: debate over continuation fees.
* CNN, still the worst, forever and ever amen.
* Trump has aggressively weaponized the ability of right-wing politicians to lie with impunity. Though you always wonder if there’s still some limit after all.
* The further I get into my thirties, the more depressed I become.
* Music stops, everybody switch positions on free speech.
* Colbert Drops to 3rd Place Behind Kimmel as New Poll Shows CBS Host Alienating Audiences. I’ve never understood CBS’s plan here.
* The McDonaldization of Medicine.
* The Unholy Alchemy behind Cheetos.
* Super-excited to trust my kids to the wisdom of the public school system.
* In the first majority-Muslim U.S. city, residents tense about its future.
* ‘Hunger Games’ Box Office: Why $101M Weekend For ‘Mockingjay 2’ May Be Cause For Despair.
* A “lost” James Bond movie written by Peter Morgan, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Frost/Nixon and The Queen, would have seen Daniel Craig’s 007 forced to kill Judi Dench’s spymaster M in a shock finale, according to a new book.
* The tech economy, still a bad joke.
* All U.S. Lab Chimps Are Finally Going To Paradise: A Retirement Home in the South Somewhere.
* Enjoy it while it lasts: Coffee’s good for you again.
* Elsewhere in science facts that are definitely going to hold up forever and ever: Scientists Say Psychopathic People Really Like Bitter Food.
* SyFy wants a Black Mirror too. Syfy is Releasing a Film, De-Rebranding, and Becoming Super Interesting.
* What crime is the founding of a bank, compared to the founding of a police department?
* But just in case you had any ideas that this wasn’t going to be a super-depressing list: Antibiotic resistance: World on cusp of ‘post-antibiotic era.’
It’s Been Much Too Long And Now There Are Much Too Many Links
* Job ad (probably best for Midwest-located scholars): Visiting Assistant Professor of English (3 positions), Marquette University.
* There’s a new issue of SFFTV out, all about the Strugatskiis.
* CFP: Octavia E. Butler: Celebrating Letters, Life, and Legacy – February 26-28, 2016 – Spelman College.
* Episode 238 of the Coode Street Podcast: Kim Stanley Robinson and Aurora.
* The weird worlds of African sci-fi.
* Afrofuturism and Black Panther.
* To save California, read Dune.
* Jameson’s essay on Neuromancer from Polygraph 25 (and his new book The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms) is available at Public Books.
* “My college has had five deans in the last 10 years. They want to make their mark. That’s fine, but the longer I’m in one place as a faculty chair, I see why faculty are cynical and jaded,” Dudley said. “Every time there is turnover, there is a new initiative. There is a new strategic plan. So many faculty are just at the point where they say ‘just leave us alone.’ “
* Pomp and Construction: Colleges Go on a Building Tear.
* 6 Ways Campus Cops Are Becoming More Like Regular Police.
* Diversity and the Ivy Ceiling.
* What academic freedom is not.
7) Academic freedom is not a gratuitous entitlement for privileged faculty but essential in achieving societal progressivity. Those with academic freedom are more likely to produce higher quality research and effective teaching that benefits society, if not always the ruling elites. I frequently state in class: “If I am not free, you aren’t free! For me to do my job, I must speak freely and teach outside the lines to help you expand your frame of knowledge and question your world.” There may not be “a” truth, however earnest the search, but the attempt to find it must be unfettered. Society spends billions of dollars on higher education, and the investment is more likely to reap dividends if revisionism, and not orthodoxy, prevails.
* Why Is It So Hard to Kill a College? Why do you sound so disappointed?
* An LSU associate professor has been fired for using curse words and for telling the occasional sexually-themed joke to undergraduate students, creating what university administrators describe as a “hostile learning environment” that amounted to sexual harassment.
* Josh Marshall: Here’s an (fun in a surreal, macabre way) article about a recent example of how Twitter has dramatically increased the velocity at which bullshit is able to travel at sea level and at higher altitudes. In fact, the increase is so great that Twitter has become a self-contained, frictionless bullshit perpetual motion machine capable of making an episode like this possible. This is the story of Zandria Robinson, an African-American assistant professor of sociology at the University of Memphis who made some that were both genuinely outrageous and also a peerless example of jargony academic nonsense-speak, became a target of right-wing media and twitter-hounds, then got fired by the University of Memphis because of the controversy, thus making the University a target of left-wingers on Twitter and driving Twitter to cross-partisan paroxysms of outrage and self-congratulation. Except that she wasn’t fired and actually wasn’t even an employee of the University of Memphis in the first place. Thanks, Twitter.
* Supreme Court to Consider Case That Could Upend Unions at Public Colleges.
* Adjuncting is not a career, TIAA-CREF edition.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 19: Resilience.
* Fraternities, man, I don’t know.
* Right-wing SF and the Charleston attack.
* Fusion is mapping the monuments of the Confederacy. Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong.
* Tomorrow’s iconic photos today.
* There’s a dark side to everything: the secret history of gay marriage.
* Andrew Sullivan’s victory lap.
* Gay rights in America, state by state (updated 26 June 2015).
* How do you tell a person to choose between having food to eat and getting married?
* When image recognition goes rogue.
* Greece just defaulted, but the danger is only beginning.
* Now We Know Why Huge TPP Trade Deal Is Kept Secret From the Public.
Let that sink in for a moment: “[C]ompanies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings — federal, state or local — before tribunals….” And they can collect not just for lost property or seized assets; they can collect if laws or regulations interfere with these giant companies’ ability to collect what they claim are “expected future profits.”
* Self-driving cars and the coming pro-driving movement.
* “I’ve been a boy for three years and I was a girl for six.” Frontline on growing up trans.
* Why are colleges investing in prisons in the first place? Don’t answer that.
* The view from over there: 38 ways college students enjoy ‘Left-wing Privilege’ on campus.
* How to Avoid Indoctrination at the Hands of ‘Your Liberal Professor.’
* You Were Right. Whole Foods Is Ripping You Off.
* “You have the wrong body for ballet.”
* The toy manufacturing sublime.
* Barack Obama is officially one of the most consequential presidents in American history. I really don’t think going on WTF is that big a deal.
* What Went Wrong: Assessing Obama’s Legacy. [paywalled, sorry]
* Debating polygamy: aff and neg (and more).
* Alex Hern decided not to do anything for a week – unless he’d read all the terms and conditions first. Seven days and 146,000 words later, what did he learn?
* Philip K Dick’s only novel for children to be reissued in UK.
* The World Without Work. The Hard Work of Taking Apart Post-Work Fantasy.
* Keita “Katamari Damacy” Takahashi is still making the best games.
* The Assassin Who Triggered WWI Just Got His Own Monument.
* Every state flag is wrong, and here is why.
* Don Featherstone, Inventor of the Pink Flamingo (in Plastic), Dies at 79.
* A people’s history of the Slinky.
* J.K. Rowling Announces “Not a Prequel” Play About Harry Potter’s Parents. There’s just no way we’re not going to get an official “next generation” sequel series in the next few decades.
* Court Affirms It’s Completely Legal To Swear Loudly At Police.
* Oh, but we have fun, don’t we?
* They’re making a sequel to Lucy, more or less just for me.
* Kotsko flashback: Marriage and meritocracy.
If in the Mad Men era the mark of success was the ability to essentially ignore one’s family while enjoying access to a wide range of sexual experiences, now the situation has reversed: monogamy and devotion are the symbol of success. And the reason this can make sense as a symbol of elite arrival is that the trappings of a bourgeois nuclear family can no longer be taken for granted as they were in the postwar heyday of the “traditional family” — they are the exception rather than the norm. In the lower and working classes, successful marriages are increasingly difficult to sustain amid the strain and upheaval that comes from uncertain employment and financial prospects (a problem that is compounded by the systematic criminalization of young men in minority communities). While marriage is still a widely-shared goal, the situation now is similar to that with college: a relatively small elite get to really enjoy its benefits, while a growing number of aspirants are burdened with significant costs (student debt, the costs of divorce) without much to show for it.
* I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery.
* When police kill the mentally ill.
* A broken bail system makes poor defendants collateral damage in modern policing strategies.
* Drug cops took a college kid’s savings and now 13 police departments want a cut.
* The 20 Best Lines From the Supreme Court Dissent Calling to End the Death Penalty.
* Someone is turning the Saved By The Bell Wiki into a thing of beauty.
* Dystopia now: “Predictive Policing.” You’re being secretly tracked with facial recognition, even in church. Air pollution and dementia. Rivers of death. The dark future of ‘Advantageous’: What happens when the difference between child-rearing and job training collapses?
* Plus, there’s this creepy shit.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine Abramsverse Star Trek sequels, forever.
* And they said my English major would never be useful.
Sunday Morning Links!
As Marquette’s faculty gathers in the basement of the Bradley Center for commencement, some links…
* I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.
* There’s tons of great stuff in issue 17 of Jacobin, from the Peter Frase editorial on automation to a call to democratize the universe to ruminations on edutopia and the smartphone society.
* Mad Max: Fury Road Is the Feminist Action Flick You’ve Been Waiting For. 3 Brief Points on Mad Max: Fury Road.
* Alastair Reynolds Says What It’ll Take To Colonize Other Planets.
* University of Wisconsin flunks the financial transparency test.
* Juxtaposition watch: Maryland governor vetoes $11 million for schools, approves $30 million for jails.
* The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit.
* Hillary Clinton personally took money from companies that sought to influence her. The next couple years are going to be a bottomless exercise in humiliation for Democrats.
* People Who Opposed The Iraq War From The Beginning Are The Best Americans.
* History is a nightmare for which I’m trying to hit the snooze: NJ Republican Introduces Resolution Condemning ‘Negative’ AP History Exam.
* City leaders approve plan for National Slave Ship Museum.
* Let the Kids Learn Through Play.
* Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?
* I also won’t accept that Someone Did a Shit So Bad On a British Airways Plane That It Had to Turn Around and Come Back Again.
* When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when?
* If Catch-22 appeared a few years before Americans were ready to read it, Something Happened jumped the gun by decades, and the novel was already forgotten when its comically bleak take on upper-middle-class life became a staple of fiction.
* Jurors In The Boston Bombing Case Had To Agree To Consider The Death Penalty Before Being Selected. This is a very strange requirement of the law that seems to strongly interfere with the “jury of your peers” ideal.
* Deleted scene from Infinite Jest. So bizarre.
* Dibs on the young-adult dystopia: Teenagers who show too much leg face being sent into an “isolation room” for breaching the new uniform code.
* New Zealand Legally Recognises Animals as ‘Sentient’ Beings.
* Schools are failing boys because lessons have become “feminised”, says a leading academic who wants to see outdoor adventure given greater emphasis in the curriculum. That’ll solve it!
* What Even Can You Even Say About The Princess-Man of North Sudan?
* What Would You Do If You Could Censor Your Past? A Visit to the UK’s Secret Archives.
* The Ecotourism Industry Is Saving Tanzania’s Animals and Threatening Its Indigenous People.
* “On the occasion of David Letterman’s retirement after 33 years of hosting a late-night talk show, Jason Snell presents his take on Letterman’s significance, told with the help of a few friends.”
However Many Links You Think There Are In This Post, There Are Actually More Links Than That
* First, they cast Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, and I said nothing.
* de Boer v. Schuman re: Hopkins. It’s not the supply, it’s the demand.
* The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto.
* Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes.
* If I worked at Kansas University, this post might get me fired.
* Rortybomb v. the social safety net.
* X-tend the Allegory: What if the X-Men actually were black? Essay version. Via.
* “Men’s Rights” Trolls Spammed Us With 400 Fake Rape Reports.
* The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency.’ It’s already here. 96 Percent Of Network Nightly News’ Coverage Of Extreme Weather Doesn’t Mention Climate Change. The year in fossil fuel disasters.
* “Unfathomable”: Why Is One Commission Trying to Close California’s Largest Public College? ACCJC Gone Wild.
* San Jose State University has all but ended its experiment to offer low-cost, high-quality online education in partnership with the massive open online course provider Udacity after a year of disappointing results and growing dismay among faculty members.
* Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses.
* CSU-Pueblo revising budget downward; up to 50 jobs at risk, loss of $3.3M.
* For-Profit College Oakbridge Academy Of Arts Suddenly Shuts Down.
* “This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” the billionaire told Politicker, calling her plight “a sad situation.”
* In Defense of ‘Entitlements.’
* Oh, I see, there’s your problem right there. Links continue below the graph.
* “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
* Scott Walker signals he will sign school mascot bill.
* Thieves steal risqué calendars, leave protest signs.
* DC Passes Great Minimum Wage and Paid Sick Days Bills. What’s in Them?
* France institutes a carbon tax.
* Community Season 5 Feels Like An Old Friend Has Finally Come Home.
* 62 Percent of Restaurant Workers Don’t Wash Their Hands After Handling Raw Beef.
* Shock in Ohio: No evidence of plot to register non-citizen voters. That only proves how successful the conspiracy has been!
* Wow: Tampa Toddler Thriving After Rare 5-Organ Transplant.
* The Decline of the US Death Penalty. Still illegal to murder people in Detroit (maybe). 15 Things That We Re-Learned About the Prison Industrial Complex in 20123. Data Broker Removes Rape-Victims List After Journal Inquiry.
* The true story of the original “welfare queen.”
* Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.
* The 16 Colleges and Universities Where It’s Hardest to Get an A.
* Michael Pollan on plant intelligence.
* Signs Taken as Wonders: Žižek and the Apparent Interpreter.
* Marriage equality reaches New Mexico.
* A vigil planned as a peaceful remembrance of a teen killed in police custody ended with tear gas and arrests Thursday night in downtown Durham.
* An oral history of the Cones of Dunshire.
* On scarcity and the Federation.
* “Characters” trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
* And ion has your science fiction postage stamps.
Wednesday Links Have Been Deemed an Essential Service
* MetaFilter has your shutdown megapost, including the list of all the “nonessential” government services that will be closed during the shutdown, including WIC, NIH, the CDC, and the EPA. Here (via Twitter) is the memo from 1995 by which OMB makes its determinations. But don’t worry; progress wealth transfer to rich people continues even in the face of this disaster. zunguzungu: “Essentially Vicious.”
* “Where the GOP Suicide Caucus Lives.” They will rule or ruin in all events. Blame the Constitution for this mess.
* Meanwhile, liberals have already been rolled on spending cuts with respect to the shutdown and it’s likely to only get worse.
* Peter Frase takes up Graeber’s “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”
* One in ten [student] borrowers across the country, 475,000 people, who entered repayment during the fiscal year ending in September 2011 had defaulted by the following September, the data showed. That’s up from 9.1 percent of a similar cohort of borrowers last year.
* Louisiana refuses to release former Black Panther despite court order.
Herman Wallace, who was held for more than 40 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana jails, is still being confined inside the prison although Judge Brian Jackson ordered on Tuesday that he be immediately released. Wallace, 71, is suffering from lung cancer and is believed to have just days to live.
We should do what works to strengthen our schools: Provide universal early childhood education (the U.S. ranks 24th among 45 nations, according to the Economist); make sure poor women get good prenatal care so their babies are healthy (we are 131st among 185 nations surveyed, according to the March of Dimes and the United Nations); reduce class size (to fewer than 20 students) in schools where students are struggling; insist that all schools have an excellent curriculum that includes the arts and daily physical education, as well as history, civics, science, mathematics and foreign languages; ensure that the schools attended by poor children have guidance counselors, libraries and librarians, social workers, psychologists, after-school programs and summer programs.
Schools should abandon the use of annual standardized tests; we are the only nation that spends billions testing every child every year. We need high standards for those who enter teaching, and we need to trust them as professionals and let them teach and write their own tests to determine what their students have learned and what extra help they need.
* The words men and women use on Facebook.
* American wages have declined 7% since 2007.
* DDoS attack on the health care exchanges? Or just a whole lot of people wanting to buy insurance?
Friday Links! Tons of Them! Not All of Them Depressing!
* The kids are all right: the editorial in the Marquette Tribune today is anti-edX, anti-robo-graders.
* MOOC as intellectual neocolonialism. Why online education is mostly a fantasy. The MOOC monster will never be satisfied.
* “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am,” said State Sen. Alberta Darling at Tuesday’s hearing. “Here we have accounts of tuition being squirreled away at the same time you raised tuition. What was your intent?” Scenes from the war on higher education in Wisconsin.
* Depression and graduate school.
Perhaps it is the self-aggrandizement the authors seem to share with the ballooning employer-fix-it crowd, but when I encountered this perennial theory in The Innovator’s Prescription, I finally realized that everything I learned as a bartender at HBS was true: things do work out perfectly when we all nod in agreement, sketch it out on cocktail napkins, and congratulate each other for being in each other’s presence.
* Hundreds of Chicago Students Walk Out of Standardized Test. Chicago Public Schools cancels district-mandated standardized test for kindergartens and first graders.
* What does the ubiquitous cheating in reform-era education mean? It means that reformers are so dumb they can’t even set up arbitrary benchmarks for success; they literally fail their own tests despite having written the questions and answers themselves. Imagine a panel of fish oil salesmen riddled with arthritis and clearly suffering from memory loss and you get some idea. What the cheating proves is that these people are liars and cheats, but more than that, it proves that the systems of accountancy and auditing promoted by the liars and cheaters are themselves a lie. The reform is doubly fraudulent.
* US schools weigh bulletproof uniforms: ‘It’s no different than a seatbelt in a car.’ Well, maybe it’s a little different. Can we agree it’s a little different?
* In short, it’s time to cash out of capitalism. Here at http://stocktips.gerrycanavan.com we’ve been rating capitalism as a DON’T BUY for years.
* Workplace Safety and the Gilded Age Theory of Risk. Hundreds of thousands of Bangladesh’s garment workers walk out in protest over factory deaths. Yglesias shrugs.
* Surprise! The Hostess bankruptcy was union-busting.
* A 2010 report produced by a Dallas investment house found that aside from the richest of the rich, among the remaining 90 percent of NFL players, nine in ten of them would be insolvent within ten years of retirement.
* UCLA professor let his students “cheat” on a game theory midterm. I can’t decide if he should have flunked the Lone Wolves or given them A+s.
* Matt Weiner says Mad Men season six is structured by the Wikipedia entry for Dante’s Inferno.
* The spectacle has to be shaped carefully so that suffering takes on the qualities of an elevating narrative the audience can feel part of, an affirmative allegory of capitalism in which hard work and energetic competition show us the most worthy, the winners. Jacobin vs. the Oscars.
* Rachel Maddow vs. Alex Jones.
* May the curse of labor be cursed, may the ineluctability of production become its sorrow.
* Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever.
* And I hate it when politicians break kayfabe. As my friend @mikemccaffrey put it: “Can you please identify the president who assaulted your democracy in this lineup?”
Batman Is At Least Fascist-Curious
In my humble opinion, this act — this decision to not end poverty because you might release a weapon into the public sphere — demonstrates the real driving force for the movie’s morality, sense of history, and its understanding of civic virtue: the violence within, which must be contained. On the one hand, to say that we could solve all problems of human need and want, but we won’t, because it might become a bomb, is to assert that inequality is not what creates the specter of violence (it’s also, oddly, a lot like the argument that “people don’t kill people; guns kill people!”). The threat of violence is prior and separate from complaints over inequality, however much they might claim to motivate it. And indeed, this was the lesson of the first movie, the lesson Bruce Wayne learned from the death of his parents: you can build an awesome Keynesian super-train and fix Gotham’s economy forever, but some random street criminal will still murder you, because. Better to invest in a secret police force.
Friday!
* John Maynard Keynes, dirty hippie. Via MeFi.
Finally, Keynes’s essay challenges us to imagine what life after capitalism might look like (for an economic system in which capital no longer accumulates is not capitalism, whatever one might call it). Keynes thought that the motivational basis of capitalism was “an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals.” He thought that with the coming of plenty, this motivational drive would lose its social approbation; that is, that capitalism would abolish itself when its work was done. But so accustomed have we become to regarding scarcity as the norm that few of us think about what motives and principles of conduct would, or should, prevail in a world of plenty.
* The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel as a case study for local journalism today: I’ve been told by people in a position to know that the paper has decided that covering all the news is beyond their scope now, with its shadow staff and limited resources. So, they have decided to go all-in on what some at the paper call “Pulitzer Pursuit.” That’s where their best reporters are tasked and that’s where their resources go.
* “Weird” is perhaps the mildest way to describe the growing number of threats and acts of intimidation that climate scientists face. A climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory answered a late-night knock to find a dead rat on his doorstep and a yellow Hummer speeding away. An MIT hurricane researcher found his inbox flooded daily for two weeks last January with hate mail and threats directed at him and his wife. And in Australia last year, officials relocated several climatologists to a secure facility after climate-change skeptics unleashed a barrage of vandalism, noose brandishing and threats of sexual attacks on the scientists’ children.
* The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia.
* And science fiction, infinite science fiction, but not for us: scientists have discovered two exoplanets a scant million miles apart.
Earth, Planet of Sadness
But at the same time, 2312 could be Robinson’s least utopian novel — beginning, as it does, from the rejection of the “Mars Trilogy”’s happier historical trajectory in favor of a world(s)-system in which the ongoing historical struggle between the residual (feudalism), the dominant (capitalism), and the emergent (none dare call it communism) never crests, but just goes horribly on and on and on. Indeed, there is a suggestion late in the novel as pessimistic and unhappy as any I can recall Robinson making: that perhaps some people are just bad, that (worse still) perhaps true evil will only exist after scarcity.
“Before [post-scarcity], it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, altruistic, cooperative, a lover of all. … However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me.”
A suggestion that the last thousand years of human history could be best described as “the late feudal period” is immediately countered by an even worse possibility: “What makes you think it’s late?” Another of Robinson’s interstitial chapters is simply a list of all the reasons that utopia can’t happen, from original sin to greed to “because it probably wouldn’t work” to “because we can get away with it.” Maybe things are bad, and people are bad, and maybe both will always stay that way…
Gerry Canavan 
