Amazing how much this talking from a balcony looks like Mussolini …

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/GettyImages-1229004060-800×533.jpg

Hacking the Law to Open Up Zones of Commoning http://www.bollier.org/blog/hacking-law-open-zones-commoning

https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/rumble/

This blew my mind. A documentary illuminating the influence of Native American music on American popular music: jazz, blues, r&b, folk, rock and roll. I had no idea of this history.

Had me out of my chair in amazement.

Interesting insight, from the last few slides of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go: a major problem with poverty is precarity, the inability to manage the ups and downs of having money one day and not the next. Stressful, hard to plan.

UBI manages the income side, but doesn’t limit the swings of the things you spend money on. One day, your cat gets sick and you have to pay a vet bill. The way we normally handle this is insurance, to smooth out the dips for a (small) cost, say 1-2% of income.

So, UBI + micro-insurance becomes a way to make poverty basically very stable and boring, instead of unstable and stressful. And you can go beyond UBI + micro-insurance to the next level, where risk increases, stress increases, and so does reward.

Interesting guy. His business is Mattereum, the application of Ethereum blockchain to things, in service of a vision of efficiency of consumption that in eliminating waste also supports economic justice (!) Check out https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/engineering-consumption-ac3bd74b1a21

Feels real.

This is me trying out the Blog at a new hosting provider.

And the photo upload seems fine, too.

www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/opinion/covid-19-winter.html

Said better than I can, but I’ve been thinking it.

Mr Foer, when discussing the abuses that Facebook et al perpetrate on US civil society, refers repeatedly to the platforms as “the public square”. But the metaphor fails for me. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, … are all private entities, and IMHO should be allowed to define their own rules, to a certain point. They’re not the corner at Hyde Park, they’re the line inside Starbucks. If Starbucks wants to allow/disallow certain kinds of behavior, within limits (physical assault, for example) they can do it. The Hyde Park corner is constrained to allow freedom of speech precisely because it is real “public space”.

This elides the other obvious, more practical question: how are these entities supposed to censor the posting of all the individuals who use their services, without (for example) introducing moderators to all spaces who are liable for errant postings? So, does everyone want all their posts submitted through a moderator before they appear?

He does note, later in the cast, the contradiction between, for example, ACLU supporters protecting speech while calling for private companies to censor their users’ posts. But, to me, the contradiction doesn’t exist, precisely because of the distinction that he fails to draw between public and private institutions.

Listen to this:

https://radioopensource.org/the-confidence-man/

Listen all the way through, to the end. It gets really dark.