While reading a couple of my favorite blogs this weekend I felt compelled to respond to their posts.
The first was about the adoption of the word blog by the traditional media outlets. You can read the post here. Here’s my response (I’m feeling too lazy to do anything other than copy paste at the moment).
Blogs aren’t about layout, they’re about individuals interacting with other individuals without all the editorial filters and crap in between.So just because Kim jong-il adds the word BLOG to his Dear Leader website it doesn’t mean he has a blog. It means he has a propaganda website with four bold letters on it.
Personally I don’t consider something a blog unless:
*The author allows Anonymous, loosely moderated comments
*The author has job outside of the blog
*The author reads other blogs
*The author engages other bloggers in conversation
*The author can keep blogging regardless of the political correctness of their words
The NYTimes et. al. don’t meet any of the above criteria so I personally don’t consider their sub-sites blogs. They do use the word blog a lot though so they’re succeeding in diluting the meaning of the word just enough to adopt it for their own marketing purposes.
The blog’s author, and the only reason I watch Kudlow and Company, Barry Ritholtz, seemed to agree with the communication bit and sent me a friendly email about my reply.
Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine was grappling with the outlook for journalists in the blog crazy future in this post. And my reply
If an article is intended to be educational I’d rather read an author who also just learned about the topic and is a great writer than by an expert who can’t write and doesn’t know how informed the average reader is.That said, blogging is so cheap and easy to do that I imagine in five years experts in all fields will be expected to have blogs by their peers if they expect to remain leaders in their field.
Maybe the generalist journalist will be able to make connections between seemingly unrelated topics and provide a clearer understanding of the big picture than could specialist bloggers.
I updated my links over on the right, I’ll be updating my books section soon. My buddy Jerome lent me Globalization and its Discontents The preface has me hooked. The author isn’t simply concerned about the socialism vs. capitalism debate. He has studied information assymetries and problems with free markets. Part of the reasoning behind my love of free markets is the result of my assumption that the forces reshaping the media business brought on by the internet are also reshaping most others but it’s harder to see because unlike fish wrappers(newspapers) we don’t look at the economics of fish distribution every day (though the WSJ has an interesting subscription only article on the sushi business today – avoid the spicy tuna rolls, the hotdog meat equivalent of the fish world).
I upgraded to a fancy new MySQL 5.0 database with PHP 5. The migration wasn’t perfect, a few characters are now question marks but I’m using latin character encoding to support other, non-blog databases on the same server.
Here are some of the posts brewing in my drafts section that should be online soon:
Money. When is enough enough?, Econ Idea Transition & Change, Hayek , The World, Some thoughts on the economy, Robotic Cow Milkers, Diamond Cartels and Austrian Economics, Essential Blogs, Deflation vs. Housing, Love drunk on her roots, Good idea, France vs. Open Source, How to Kill a Business with a Union…, Wiggle Room for Waste, The End of War? Poverty?, The Latent Potential of Middlemen
I’ve also been thinking about a welfare state where kids get the bulk of benefits instead of arthritic voters andthe emergence of small government in San Diego by necessity due to our pension crisis.
There’s an interesting read over at The First Church of Free Speech about our American distaste for all things Darwin.
In every poll, a majority of Americans believe that the Biblical creation story is the literal truth about how humans came into existence. And according to the Harris poll, 55% of Americans think that evolution, creationism and intelligent design should all be taught in science classes. According to the Zogby poll, a staggering 88% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 think that intelligent design should receive “equal time” in the classroom. All three polls also showed that the usual suspects are most likely to believe superstitious religious crap over science: Southerners, Republicans, those with no education beyond high school and old people. So if you’re a Southern Republican over 55 with no higher education and you don’t subscribe to creationism or intelligent design, congratulations. You’re a statistical anomoly.
I have this theory that people will generally believe in God or Big Government but not both and not neither. We programming/math nerds call this XOR, just in case you’re curious…
A connective in logic known as the “exclusive or,” or exclusive disjunction. It yields true if exactly one (but not both) of two conditions is true.
I imagine when robots are calling the shots in a few decades there won’t be a distinction between mathematician and philosopher.
…My reply was this: Great points until you get into economics. The intellectuals with Ph.Ds in econ tend to think Socialism is a great idea. The god fearing masses may be wrong about darwin but their low-tax instincts are a good thing. In other words it could be worse, we could be a nation of atheists that think Marx was on to something. Ideally we’d be pro separation of Church/State and anti-Socialist but that’s a hell of a lot to ask people who don’t want to live without either a big friendly god or a big friendly brother. Though I wonder if big governments see religion as competition (tithings vs. taxes) and subtly discourage religion, though China unsubtly encarcerates Falun Gongers.
Being the weird contrarian that I am I don’t fit into my own theory about how humans behave. I don’t believe in god or big government. Oh and I thought the finch on the flag was appropriate all things considered.
Photo by DigitalGurl
My friend and I were drinking imported mexican beer, discussing globalization and the race to the bottom. What follows is the beerless conclusion to my argument…
My view of what’s about to go down doesn’t really fall into any easily defined categories of left, right, bear, man-cow, etc. I believe that we’re transitioning into an era where millions of jobs will be lost due to productivity gains. Economists are already saying that there are plenty of job openings but not enough qualified people to fill them. I think that trend is about to get much, much stronger.
So to sum up my idea: A lack of productivity (relative to some theoretical limit) acts as a form of wealth redistribution which is now going away due to the accelerating productivity trend. A lack of technology has the same stifling effect on an economy as powerful labor unions.
Some consequences:
Median wages drop
Housing bubble pops hard
Deflation, which makes lower wages easier to swallow
Higher living standards due to high productivity
Angry people that prefer welfare from an employer instead of the government (it’s a pride thing)
Issue 2: The only way to keep living standards relatively high is by limiting government while increasing wealth redistribution. That sounds like a bizzare contradiction but only if you assume wealth redistribution requires bureaucracy. Take food stamps. An alternative would be to have government run soup kitchens spread throughout the country “creating jobs”. Of course the labor unions would demand $50/hour and fat pensions which would require higher taxes and would result in less money for food. So we have food stamps.
Food stamps of the future will probably be codes programmed into cell phones that allow people to carry a balance with them. They could draw from the food or medical balance depending on what they need but the services would be provided by private businesses. So you could have a government website that adds food, medical and education credits to these mobile devices which people use like food stamps but you could prevent the transfer of credits between devices so people wouldn’t be able to buy a gun with food stamps. They could buy butter and trade it for guns but the credit wouldn’t become a currency.
That sounds crazy coming from someone with libertarian leanings but then I never had a problem with the goals of Socialism: equality, justice, etc. just the fact that it leads to poverty and inequality. Wouldn’t it be strange if anarcho-capitalism generated enough wealth to realize the socialist dream of fat, happy middle class? Of course the middle class will be unemployed but some might look at that as early retirement, especially if everyone else is retired as well.
While reading a couple of my favorite blogs this weekend I felt compelled to respond to their posts.
