Posts Tagged ‘scarcity’
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* Public showings of the Tolkien Manuscripts at Marquette, 2016-2017.
* Don’t Panic, But There’s An Asteroid Right Over There.
* Why is the keynote speech such a train wreck at most academic conferences?
* Because it’s that time of year again: my two-part piece from Inside Higher Ed from a few years back on entering the academic job market as an ABD, 1, 2. But of course:
* How to Do a Better Job of Searching for Diversity.
* How could anyone think graduate students shouldn’t have a Plan B?
* Great teaching document: Some Notes on How to Ask a Good Question about Theory That Will Provoke Conversation and Further Discussion from Your Colleagues.
* And more: Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion.
* Trump: graft :: Clinton : paranoia.
* And marrying the last two links: One in Six Eligible Voters Has a Disability.
* “Debate” and the end of the public sphere.
* Let history be our judge: Pepe the Frog, an explainer.
* If Hillary Had to Drop Out, Here’s How a New Democratic Candidate Would be Chosen. Former DNC chairman calls for Clinton contingency plan.
* Researchers at the Karadag Nature Reserve, in Feodosia, Russia, recorded two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, called Yasha and Yana, talking to each other in a pool. They found that each dolphin would listen to a sentence of pulses without interruption, before replying.
* Ancient Black Astronauts and Extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic Science Fiction as Urban Mythology.
* Getting Restless At The Head Of The Class.
* CFP: this xkcd.
* Demystifying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
* Going viral this week: extinction illusions.
* In search of the universal language.
* Reported Concussions in Youth Soccer Soar a Mere 1,600 Percent in 25 Years, According to Study.
* Nice work if you can get it: Wells Fargo won’t claw back $125m retirement bonus from exec who oversaw 2m frauds.
* Sexting in the seventh grade.
* Colin Kaepernick’s Protest Is Working.
* How the sugar industry has distorted health science for more than 50 years.
* Stories that should be more exciting than they are: We Were Wrong About Where the Moon Came From!
* I read Jason Shiga’s Demon as a crowdfunder — it’s great. Check out the first volume when it comes to print next month.
* Special providence: Catfish Falls From The Sky, Hits Woman In The Face.
* The organizing economic metaphor of all of Against Everything is artificial scarcity. The concept usually refers to the way that monopolistic sellers exploit their excessive market power to restrict supply so they can raise prices. Greif’s view is more capacious and idiosyncratic: He describes a culture where the affluent, at sea in a world of abundance, engage in the elaborate restriction of their own demand (to kitsch diners, ethnic food, inappropriately youthful sexual partners). This turns what could be unfussy gratification into resource-intensive performance. On one level, this is about making a technically meaningless life more diverting, but it also gives our atomized selves the comfort of belonging. It serves to differentiate “people like me” from those other, worse people—those without access to the most current information, say, or simply the economic means to act on it. What gives n+1’s economistic turn its authority and novelty is the way Greif and his colleagues show that the market is not, as someone like Gary Becker had it, a bazaar untainted by sinister, irrational notions (discrimination, exploitation, class prejudice), but a site where those things are given free play under cover of neutral utility-maximizing exchange. They have taught us to speak the softer insights of theory (with its sensitivity to symbolic difference and its hermeneutics of suspicion) in the hardheaded but incantatory vernacular of the powerful.
* The New Yorker remembers the Wilmington coup of 1898.
* And I’m catching up late, but man oh man, Bojack Horseman is a good show.
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.
Friday Night!
* The gravity in this place is different. I’ve spoken to others who’ve traveled out here, too, and returned home safely. When you become one of them, you learn quickly that you share a language others can’t understand. Xeni Jardin, on diagnosis.
* On a less life-changing note, I’m devastated that I can’t attend this panel on Brecht and the Muppets.
* Nate Silver: No, this time there might really be a brokered convention. Ezra Klein: Newt Gingrich will not be the Republican nominee — even if it means a brokered convention. 21 reasons Newt Gingrich won’t be the Republican nominee for president. Romney goes after Newt’s sci-fi plans for moon colonies and space mirrors. (Meanwhile, Steve Benen goes after Romney’s apparent belief in cold fusion.) Desperate Romney PAC panics, unloads on Newt:
But what I found truly remarkable was the message Romney’s allies put together. Consider the areas of attack: foreclosures, flip-flops, immigration “amnesty,” climate change, and finally, “Newt supported a health care mandate … the centerpiece of ‘Obamacare.’” The spot then relies on a George Will column.
This is just astounding. Does Mitt Romney’s Super PAC know anything about Mitt Romney? He supports foreclosures; he’s the most shameless flip-flopper in a generation; he’s too big a coward to take a stand on immigration; he used to believe in climate change and supported cap and trade; and George Will thinks Romney is “a recidivist reviser of his principles,” who seems to “lack the courage of his absence of convictions.”
More at Gawker’s Brief Guide to Conservatives Freaking Out over Newt Gingrich.
* NYU to offer classes on Occupy Wall Street.
* Another David Graeber interview.
* Bookstores are becoming mere showrooms for Amazon.com. More at MetaFilter, including some commentary on tomorrow’s “Price Check” Day.
* Dan Frommer explain the new Twitter.
* Tor brings to my attention Nick “Simulation Argument” Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia (2006-2010).
* The headline reads, “World Watches as Norway Runs Out of Butter.”
Norwegians have eaten up the country’s entire stockpile of butter, partly as the result of a “low-carb” diet sweeping the Nordic nation which emphasizes a higher intake of fats. “Sales all of a sudden just soared, 20 per cent in October then 30 per cent in November,” said Lars Galtung, the head of communications at TINE, the country’s biggest farmer-owned cooperative.
* And io9 has a exhaustive list of the rules of magic. Study hard. You never know.
Given the Material Abundance Made Possible by the Replicator, How Would It Be Possible to Maintain a System Based on Money, Profit, and Class Power?
Thus it seems that the main problem confronting the society of anti-Star Trek is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers.
Good Writing from Other People
I have a few projects I’m desperately behind on at the moment, so here in lieu of actual content is good writing from people who aren’t me:
* My friend Lisa on the intellectual proletariat.
* Aaron Bady on Franzen’s Freedom and the project of unfinished realism. (Having actually read Freedom [it’s all right, even pretty good] instead of done the things I was supposed to do I may post about it someday soon myself.)
* Socialism and/or Barbarism on Swamp Thing, scarcity, and “green politics.”
* Easily Distracted on what it might mean to really take responsibility.
* And Crooked Timber, against Malcolm Gladwell, on blogs, bullets, and bullshit.
Kit-Kats for Everyone
‘Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future.’ I love this story so much I don’t even care it was an April Fool’s joke.
Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”
Monday Night Links
* On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure. (Via R. Vu.)
* Science proves naps are great.
* Science proves 3-D movies hurt your brain.
* Should we clone Neanderthals? OBVIOUSLY. (Please don’t.)
* Time to renew my campaign to steal Duke’s copy of Action Comics #1. I just need to find ten to twelve other guys to help me do the job.
* Science proves economic growth no longer possible for rich countries.
* Mapping the mind of Tommy Westphall.
* BREAKING: Newsweek editors are surprisingly unprofessional in their private emails to each other.
* The public option is really popular! But you can never have it.
* Five Republican Senators put country over party. That list includes Scott Brown, socialist stooge.
* The Republican Party’s obituary has been written before, but demographics simply aren’t on their side.
* Turkish temple predates agricultural civilization. (Via Kottke.) There’s no doubt this thing was built by aliens:
Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities.
Wake up, sheeple!
* And some friends of mine have work forthcoming in Drawing Is a Way of Thinking: The Comics of Chris Ware, available now for pre-order from Amazon. Check it out.
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Jared Diamond once called agriculture the worst mistake in the history of the human race, but Daniel Ben-Ami at spiked online still thinks we can just invent our way out of scarcity.
But the pervasive cynicism towards popular prosperity still has a negative effect. It makes it harder to enjoy or make the most of what we have got. It is also a barrier against making things better still. In this context, it is important to remember that there are still many billions of people in the world who live in poor countries. And yet the prospect of everyone having access to the best the world has to offer is commonly seen as an environmental nightmare rather than a worthwhile goal.
That there may in fact be practical limits to growth, or that we may be fast approaching those limits, is something Ben-Ami seems not to consider.
Gerry Canavan 
