Arnold Kling on the differences between BigWorld and SmallWorld. The Department of Homeland Security appeals to those of the Intelligent Design faith. It was created under the theory that the reason that government failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks was that it was not centralized enough. What we needed was a larger organization, with more missions and less ability to focus. As a hard-core Intelligent Design believer, Brad De Long believes that DHS could be effective with the right administrators. To skeptics (including many of its employees), DHS is a clusterfxxx no matter whom you put in charge. Generically, Intelligent Design theory supports bigger government. Because you believe that centralized solutions can work, you argue in favor of them. Every time you observe a phenomenon that strikes you as less than perfect - people without Health Insurance, people whose income fluctuates (Income Mobility), people who are overweight (Obesity) - you ring a bell and yell "Market Failure!" You presume that every social flaw can and should be addressed by government action... Transactions within the small organization are based on informal rules and tacit understanding. Responsibility for the success of the organization is shared. Members often trust one another completely and feel intensely loyal to the organization. When a few key members articulate a need for change, the rest of the organization will go along... Large organizations exist, in spite of their awkwardness, because they create or exploit Economies Of Scale.
I've had 3 of these (more)
Yascha Mounk: Why I'm Losing Trust in the Institutions. Who should be first in line to get the vaccine against Covid-19? (more)
The Mutualist Economy: A New Deal for Ownership - Ideas - Berggruen Institute. Tracing how federal government policies have worked to support personal and public wealth building across three periods: the First Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century, the Second Industrial Revolution of the early 20th century, and the Information and Communication Technology revolution of the late-20th century. (more)
Herman Martinus: My product is my garden. I’ve been part of the internet startup scene for a while. There are so many different camps: the bootstrappers, the VC-backed tech-bros, the crypto “investors”, the people marketing their courses on marketing courses, the newsletter gurus, the micro-saas homeboys. (more)
Paul Krugman: Stagflation revisited. Nakamura, together with Jon Steinsson, has been at the cutting edge of empirical macroeconomics. For example, N/S made a big impact during the stimulus/austerity wars with a paper using the differential impact of military spending across states to estimate multipliers. The new paper uses a similar approach to estimate how much impact unemployment has on the inflation rate. (more)
The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Donald Trump’s assault on democracy. (more)
Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 2/4: Safe and Effective Vaccines Aplenty. The vaccine data is in. It’s pretty great. We now have six known safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines. The problem is that due to our unwillingness to properly fund the process of scaling up, we are stalling out at about 1.3 million doses per day for a population of 330+ million people each of whom needs two doses. (more)
The United States Chamber of Commerce (USCC) is a business-oriented American lobbying group. Politically, the Chamber usually supports Republican political candidates, though it has occasionally supported conservative Democrats.[2][3] The Chamber is the largest lobbying group in the U.S., spending more money than any other lobbying organization on a yearly basis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Commerce (more)
Urban Design Framing: hoping to combine the best aspects of city and village (more)
The rise of the ambient video game (more)
(from 2003) Given that there are a limited number of musical tones, it seems to me there's a limited number of songs that could be written. Could you auto-generate songs and then demand licenses for every new ditty that came out? How about if you simpify the idea to reduce the number of combinations? Just go for a accomplishing a "similar sounding hook", which might be enough to cause trouble. (more)
Family Farm operator - beyond Grass-Fed (more)
Venkatesh Rao: Weirding Diary: 11. We’re barely seven weeks into 2020, and it’s already the weirdest year in my living memory. (more)
there are [n] kinds of people... (more)
pseudo-PublicSpace of the Suburb (more)
belief in the existence of One True God (more)
This is the publicly-readable WikiLog Digital Garden (17k pages, starting from 2002) of Bill Seitz (a Product Manager and CTO). (You can get your own pair of garden/note-taking spaces from FluxGarden.)
My Calling: Reality Hacking to accelerate Evolution by increasing Freedom, Agency, and Leverage of Free Agents and smaller groups (SmallWorld) via D And D of Thinking Tools (software and Games To Play).
See Intro Page for space-related goals, status, etc.; or Wiki Node for more terse summary info.
Beware the War On The Net!
Current:
- head of product for an early-stage boot-strapped company
- founder FluxGarden for Digital Garden hosting
- wrote Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook Getting Things Done And Other Systems ASIN:B00HHJA5JS
My Coding for fun.
Past:
- Director Product Managment, NCSA Sports
- CTO/Product Manager at a series of startups: MedScape, then Axiom Legal, then Living Independently, then DailyLit, then AEP...
- founded Family Financial Future, personal-financial-planning nagware for parents
- consulting
- founded Teamflux.com, a hosting service for wiki-based collaboration spaces.
- founded Wikilogs.com, a hosting service for WikiLog-s (wiki-based weblogs).
Agile Product Development, Product Management from MVP to Product-Market Fit, Adding Product To Your Startup Team, Agility, Context, and Team Agency, (2022-10-12) Accidental Learnings of a Journeyman Product Manager
Big Levers, Theory of Change, Change the World, (2020-06-27) Ways To Nudge Future; Network Enlightenment, Optimistic Near Future Vision; Huge Invention; Alternatives To A College Degree; Credit Crisis 2008; Economic Transition; Network Economy; Making A Living; Varieties Of Info Technology Jobs; Generative Schooling; Product Oriented Unschooling; Reality Hacker; A 20th Century Economic Theory
FluxGarden; Network Enlightenment Ecosystem; Hypermedia Pattern Language; Everyone Needs Their Own ThinkingSpace; Digital Garden; Virtual ThinkingSpace; Thinking Tools Companies; Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts; My CollaborationWare History; Wiki Proliferation; Portal Collaboration Roadmap; Wiki For GroupWare, Overlapping Scopes Of Collaboration, Email Discussion Beside Wiki, Wiki For CollaborationWare, Collaboration Roadmap; Sister Sites; Wiki Hack
Personal Cloud; 2018-11-29-NextOpenInfrastructure, 2018-11-15-BooksVsTweets; Stream/Flow Vs Garden/Stock
Social Warrens; Culture War; 2017-02-15-MindmapCultureWarSocialMediaEconomy; Cultural Pluralism
Fractally Generative Pattern Language, Small Tribe, SimplestThing, Becoming A Reality Hacker, Less-Bullshit Living, The Craft; Games To Play; Evolution, Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook, Getting Things Done, And Other Systems
Digital Therapeutics, (2021-05-26) Pondering a Mental Health space, CoachBot; Inside-Out Markov Chain