If, on the other hand, you’re poor and powerless, standing up for yourself is normally disastrous. If you have little to offer, you have to rely on the goodwill of others. And one of the surest ways to make a bonfire of your accumulated goodwill is to embrace a bad attitude.

The tendency that advertises itself as the philosophy of self-interest is more accurately advertised as the philosophy of ‘know your place.’ Kochsuckers.

“… or in other words, does economics (as it’s currently constituted) inherently promote a vision of markets for everything and no rights but property rights?”—JW Mason

“The broken window fallacy is always a fallacy, but creative destruction is a vital part of capitalism.”—Unlearning economics

“China and India didn’t steal our middle class jobs, so much as provide a death row holding cell for jobs that one way or another are going to be automated out of existence.”—shend

Back page of the ad from DII (Dominican International Institute)

Half (15 of 30) courses listed on their “mini-catalog” (but there are a total of more than 600 courses) are under the heading “School of Health & Medicine.” The innovation of weekly rates, no-interest financing, and apparently superlative affordability, combined with the recent political shitstorm concerning Catholic (and other sectarian) hospitals (and other sectarian employers other than places of worship) and their employee benefits, combined of couse with my natural paranoia (but everyone has that, right?) leads me to wonder whether Mother Church wants an all-Catholic (specifically Dominican?) supply chain for hospital personnel. Here’s the front page:

They claim their tuition is “lower than any college in Michigan.” If it lives up to the hype, then it’s a game-changer. The MCC referred to is Macomb Community College, which is a public college. No doubt MCC is the infrastructure for the “600 courses & 35+ Careers…” while this parochial entity gets credit for revolutionizing the cost structure of higher education.

William Gillis reminds us:

The upshot is that connectivity is privilege. Not a privilege that should be abolished or rolled back, but one that should nevertheless be constantly recognized, addressed and struggled with in our daily lives. Disequilibria in connectivity leads to compounded relative inequality and implicit power dynamics, but because connectivity is what animates altruism (which provides absolute advances for all) the egalitarian solution in any context is always to expand connectivity for all.

If your revolution doesn’t place a pretty high priority on maximizing inclusivity, then I don’t want any part in it. The well-connected we will always have with us, but a bit of noblesse oblige might not be a bad idea. Mentors for the rest of us, if you will. And maybe, just maybe, we can get rid of the civil service bureaucracy without getting rid of the ideal of meritocracy.

“The only thing that matters is who has the power when the next age of technology rolls out. When nanotechnology, perfect lie detectors, quantum computers, advanced AI, and advanced electronics surveillance comes out within the next 10-20 years, I sure hope someone who respects civil liberties is in power, because if they aren’t, there will never be another chance to turn the tide. It will be too late.”—LaughingCat

“Who cares that the ‘homeowners’ don’t own any percentage of their ‘homes’? They are still more responsible, valuable and attention-worthy than all those renters who are rootless, unreliable lazy layabouts. Thus, the myth that everybody needs to shoulder a humongous mortgage because that’s the truly American thing to do gets perpetuated.”—Clarissa

“Thinking that an invisible hand is going to lead to a stable solution, let alone an appropriate one or an optimal one, is based on magical thinking.”—Tom Hickey

Well, I think that’s a loaded question (albeit, unintentionally).

First, I only see two “anti-capitalist” situtations where networking would be irrelevant: abundance, and centralized planning where a job is guaranteed to everyone and every job is essentially identical. The first I think is unlikely to occur (at least in the near future), and the second I think is undesirable.

I think that’s a loaded answer, but I’ll get to that farther down the page. A few sentences farther down Ricketson’s page we read:

…the “non-capitalist” economy that I focus on is one where individuals and small groups have control over all the materials that they need to make a living — housing, land, and tools. In this situation, the employer/employee power relationship doesn’t exist, and so neither does the conventional idea of a “job” being something that you have or don’t have (or something that could be abundant). All we would have is time and tools and the need to decide how to use our time and our tools most effectively to satisfy our desires. “Jobs” would be small, specific tasks.

I recognize some very real advantages in this version of a non-capitalist economy. If a worker doubles as a vendor or contractor or whatever you want to call it (I call it a capitalist FWIW) then the employer/employee relationship is replaced by vendor/customer relationships. The beauty in this is that the former is singular while the latter are plural. If all (or most) of one’s livelihood is earned working for one entity, that entity is a monopsonist, monopsonist being to buyers as monopolist is to sellers; the common term for both being “market power.” I believe that market power really is power; specifically political power. I’m actually agnostic on the question of whether it can exist independently of the state. It is in the spirit of Devil’s advocacy that I assert that it can. I also see a very real downside, in that one successful act of selling oneself doesn’t go as far as “landing a J.O.B.” so one is more on the defensive more of the time. For people like me who really hate selling, there’s also a quality of life angle. As a member of Generation X, I entered the workforce during the Reagan era, so J.O.B.’s within my reach (since I wasn’t a proverbial straight-A student, or ex-military) were either part-time or temporary, or both. At first I signed on with the pitemp agencies. Finding the effective (pro-rated, if you will) income insufficient to the (IMHO) humble goal of being self supporting, at some point I pondered whether moonlighting two or more permanent part time J.O.B.’s might be a less ineffective strategy than floating from one full-time temp gig to another. While I didn’t find this to be “the ticket,” I did manage to hobble together a “portfolio” of J.O.B.’s that at least got me out of the nest in a not-quite-solvent fashion. There really is a difference between being two layoffs away from having nothing, and one, but the difference only goes so far. On the one hand, half a loaf is better than no loaf, but half a livelihood is a form of non-survival, or at least non-independence. Now I know that a certain subset of Generations X, Y, Z and beyond see the trend from J.O.B.’s to gigs as an unalloyed positive. For the most part, I think the ones who feel that way are the ones who have demonstrated (most importantly to themselves) the ability to get gigs that actually require some intelligence, while I was more secretarial pool. I know I’m too good for that, but communicating that fact to others has never been my strong suit. Call it a character defect if you must, but I remain convinced that a trend toward a more market-driven or entreprenoorship-driven economy, even if the trend is away from stifling bureaucracy, while probably a net positive, has at least the side effect of amplifying extrovert privilege. Yeah, I scratched a privilege. So sue me. Anyway, in my own experience, the disadvantages of precarity seem to outweigh the “freedom” of the “free” lance life. But compared to what? Being too young to have experienced the Golden Age of J.O.B. Security and Bennies from within the workforce, I may be underestimating the magnitude of such monstrosities as the Organization Man, the near absence of the Organization Woman, the witch hunts, the plain vanilla culture and even Inflation. I’d like to think I’d have gotten farther in life when the gatekeepers tended to include more civil service exams and periodic reviews and not as much the elevator pitches, “networking” and the necessity of utterly shameless self-promotion, but it’s not like extrovert privilege is a recent invention.

Now as to the loaded answer. It’s not obvious to me that everyone being guaranteed a J.O.B. somehow implies every J.O.B. being identical. It sounds suspiciously like the right wing talking poing of equating egalitarianism to a belief in or wish for all persons being identical. What I envision is the application of extreme transparency to the buying and selling of labor. I do prefer the “agorist” vision of small, specific tasks over the “capitalist” reality of winner-take-all pursuit of employed-status (and the noticeably more exclusive gainfully-employed-status, and solvent-status, non-homeless-status and all those other status goods that both capitalism and agorism seem to treat as, in the final analysis, non-entitlements.) The realization of extreme transparency would add some things to the otherwise agorist mix that would make it more palatable to me. One would be a level of detail in feedback that literally strips away any mystery as to why I might fail to be chosen for any particular “small, specific task” (S.S.T., if you will). The more vulgar type of (alleged?) market advocate will say, “oh, the lack of that type of feedback is just lawsuit protection.” I hope agorists don’t see the situation as quite that simple, and can at least imagine other contributing factors in the status quo economy, such as the use of asymmetric information as a strategic asset. Another side effect of extreme transparency would be knowing the identity of the people who do win each S.S.T., and at what price. Of course the identity of every “unemployed” person would also be public knowledge, which sounds dangerous, but I would feel more than compensated for it by seeing made objectively testable the question of whether underutilized talent has more basis in fact than do unicorns. If there are demographic patterns in who’s getting the S.S.T.’s (i.e., discrimination), that too should come out in the wash sooner rather than later under conditions of extreme transparency. No guarantees implied, BTW. But I think it would invite the surrounding culture to adopt full empS.S.T. participation as a social norm, which of course it already has, but this time in a “trust but verify” way.

Taking it back a step further to the question of whether a shift away from capitalism can potentially obviate the burden ofneed for networking—a particular S.S.T., like a J.O.B. is something one either has or does not have. Each one is a lower-stakes game, so one can afford to lose S.S.T.’s—to a point. Perhaps it’s the best of all possible worlds, abundance being unlikely, and all. Perhaps information doesn’t really want to be free, and extreme transparency is also a pipe dream (or cloud cuckoo land, as the right wingers like to say). But consider this:  If it’s unsafe (or even just inefficient) to consult a mechanic without knowing a mechanic, or being a friend of a friend of one, what we have, most of all, is a failure of transparency. Networking, in addition to being a form of nepotism, is a form of insider trading. If knowing who to hire for an S.S.T., where the S.S.T.’s are, or who is competent, or how to get value for one’s money (or whatever one uses in the agora) is guesswork, then we must question the claims that prices contain all information, or even much information. If finding out the answers to these questions is a social exercise, then socializing is part of everyone’s J.O.B. description: no social connectivity=no S.S.T.’s=don’t buy groceries. Even absent the state I have no problem referring to that as an aristocracy of pull.

Just another reminder that, while the government is not your friend, the private sector is not your friend, either.

The meme (courtesy of Jamie) is simple; name six fictional characters in whom you could see yourself, and explain why you were able to do so. Mine are as follows:

1. Shevek: From U. K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Not the theoretical physicist protagonsit, but the other Shevek, inventor of a bearing used in heavy machinery. But seriously, Shevek the main character was the inspiration behind pubwan, by being such a spokesman for non-classified non-proprietary research.
2. Rain: In Out of Oz, the fourth installment in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked Years series. I suspect he was trying to see how brazenly autistic a character he could come up with.
3. Kilgore Trout: featured in several books by Kurt Vonnegut, particularly Breakfast of Champions. Living on the margins, and relegated to obscurity by the necessity of the business model. In his case, science fiction being economically dependent on the business model of pornographic novels.
4. Sherlock Holmes: The one in the contemporary version now playing Sunday nights on PBS. Wonderfully deadpan.
5. Jen Lindley: character on the TV series Dawson’s Creek played by Michelle Williams. AFAIK the television medium’s first out-of-the-closet atheist character since the Meathead on All in the Family.
6. Betty Suarez: of Ugly Betty. An “ingenue” character. Those are always interesting.

Back when we broke the story in June, Silk Road’s anonymous administrator said he wouldn’t allow weapons to be sold on the site. But since then, an entire subcategory for firearms has sprung up.

This is why I’m always looking for noncommercial (I would go as far as to say non-entrepreneurial) ways to do things. The thing that all business models seem to have in common is that at some point they lose their innocence. If there’s some pale you’re not willing to go beyond, at some point a competitor will be, and your scruples are your competitive disadvantage. Commerce will always be an arena in which nice guys and gals finish last. In related news, the Diaspora community finds itself in need of a business model:

Number four, DStar must take action to place JD on a sound financial footing. I see two ways to do this: (1) advertising, and (2) subscriptions. Most likely, both will be needed.

Analytics: Nearly every site uses some sort of analytics, if only to help with allocation of server resources and deploying anti-spam and anti-cracking defenses. I imagine that some idea of what features are used and in which sequence they get used is going to strongly influence which features get the most developer attention, also. JD should implement a solution like Piwik, until effective analytics can be integrated into the Diaspora software as a plugin. Without analytics, JD will have no way to know how to adjust the appearance and operation site to enable it to become profitable.

Advertising: Although Google’s adsense is said to be the more profitable ad network, there is absolutely no way that JD can use it. JD is going to have to build its own ad network (using OpenX or a similar application) or contract another ad network to service the site. However this is done, ads shown on JD need to respect its users’ privacy and the integrity of the Diaspora experience. This means no expanders, none of those popups when you roll over text, no “please view this ad while the page loads”, and positively no “you were discussing cats so we’ll show an ad for XYZ cat food”.

Subscriptions: Subscriptions are an excellent way to pay for some of the costs of operation. Subscription-only would chase away those who cannot afford it, or those who object to paid-only sites. Subscriptions as a “see fewer ads, subscribe” would be the best option.

The trouble with “see fewer ads, subscribe” as a business model is that the advertising becomes a value-subtracted feature. Soon the feature is not the advertising itself but the tamper-resistance of the advertising. Advertising is replaced with adware. Ick.

As for the analytics, if the real reason is to help with the allocation of resources within Diaspora, etc., then by all means make the analytical data available to the public. Assuming your analytics provided doesn’t contractually obligate you to do your analytic work behind a curtain…