I'm a big fan of an economic philosophy known as distributism, popularized by G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc more than a century ago.
It basically says that the economy works best when ownership of productive property is as diffuse as possible -- when a high percentage of the population has some ownership, and it's not concentrated in the hands of a relatively few wealthy shareholders (in the case of capitalism) or the government (in the case of communism/socialism).
Under distributist principles, I would say that we should pursue economic policies that allow the ownership of productive AI to be widespread, whether that's in the form of cooperatives, employee ownership, or other means of giving the average person access to that ownership. (I acknowledge that it's currently possible to invest in publicly traded AI companies, but would prefer to see other ownership opportunities as well.)
Are you not familiar with the many ways in which distributism is already practiced and has been practiced during the past two centuries?
Every federal credit union in the U.S., every worker's cooperative or consumer cooperative -- including biggies like Mondragon in Spain and The Cooperative in U.K. -- is organized in the way that distributism advocates.
There is nothing stopping us from electing lawmakers who recognize that society becomes healthier when the ownership of productive property is not concentrated, and who advocate for economic policies that promote more diffuse ownership.
At a surface level, an important difference between "distributism" and the supposed examples you provide is that those examples are each (correct me if I'm wrong) consensual, but it's not clear whether this "distributism" would be consensual. It smells like force would be required to keep people in line.
Capitalism enables the boundless concentration of wealth and power in individuals. I reject the premise that seeking to become a billionaire is a natural behavior, instrinsic to the human experience.
I won't pretend to know what should replace capitalism, but I am sure we can do better.
I don't think a popular audience is buying a book on mathematics.
But, the world is huge. Even if this is kind of niche (people who didn't really get into maths in school or college, but now have a strange impulse to pick it up for shits and giggles) the audience is still thousands of people. Or just, people who want to see how Tao connects everything up, because the way he sees and explains stuff is amazing.
There are levels to what's worth publishing or working on in general. Hardly anyone is going to be the next Steven Hawking but this obsession with the most popular or successful celebrity creators ultimately leads to this highly homogenised global media landscape. The most exciting thing about the internet for me was always accessing the long tail of truly unusual shit that you wouldn't find in book/record stores, tv, etc.
I have a PhD in physics and I read Hawking's book as a child.
You just got me to realize that while I've read many physics popular books that have been "simplified enough that the common person can get something out of them, but not so much that they become meaningless", maths books that achieve the same are much rarer, I think.
True. Math is drier than physics. But Terrence Tao is well known, and there are a lot of nerds on the planet. The last popular math book I read wasn't good (Humble Pi; a Comedy of Math Errors), but I did enjoy e.g. How to Lie with Statistics, and, to a lesser extent, Innumeracy. I would buy Tao's book, probably.
We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model.
You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content.
What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model.
I'm a former news editor and left the industry because the business side couldn't figure out a viable business model.
I realize and feel deeply the loss we experience (especially at the local and state level) when quality journalism dies out, and I would love for the industry to recover.
But they're not going to do it unless they recognize that single-site subscriptions (or micropayment transactions) aren't going to cut it.
Copying the cable model would favor big media companies over smaller, more local players.
A music-streaming style option, where the user's monthly payment is distributed in proportion to the articles they read, might be better. (Although not without it's own issues)
I tend to agree, but the big problem is "who will operate this?".
The music model worked because a heavyweight like apple was able to come in and negotiate with a huge number of labels while simultaneously allowing access to unlabeled content. That expanded with Spotify, though they got there by effectively stealing the music for as long as possible until they were established.
I can't see how that'd work with news. Especially since so many of the news outlets exist and have been created to run propaganda for the owners. A decent number of them are effectively just funded by billionaires that want to push their agendas.
I think this is even harder to make work than straightforward micropayments with crypto or paypal or similar.
Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.)
Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they get paid a lot of money and/or can be assured it somehow will not cannibalize their direct sales.
Who owns the customer relationship? Publishers have been burned pretty much 100% of the time they cede that direct relationship to someone else.
Also, it's been tried: see Scroll, Apple News, Flattr, Coil, Brave BAT...
I agree Scroll seemed very promising but I'm not sure how successful they were. Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees? Meeting that goal while burning investors money is less impressive.
Anecdata: I use Apple News+ for exactly this reason. I get many publications included, and some magazines, and over time it learns what stories I like and surfaces those more often.
Centralised billing effectively makes serious journalism impossible. Omnibus subscription services will ruthlessly cut anything that affects the bottom line, and effective journalism is necessarily unpopular.
I'd encourage you to ask a recording artist how they like the arrangement they have with Spotify.
But also, yeah, I do think the streaming financial incentives affect what music gets written and produced. Just not necessarily anything to do with cuss words.
The artists are there because of their own free will. They voluntarily signed their contracts with the record labels. How are journalists and independent journalism doing in comparison?
+1. I come online to discover new things because there's less friction online than anywhere else. What's more, digging through a mountain of content to find something that resonates with you is a form of work in its own right.
Micropayments are friction, and if you put friction on top of the work of discovery, I will do something else with my time.
The problem we have is that there are a ton of sites all asking for $5+. With PBS people can choose to give once at whatever they're comfortable with and aren't dealing with an ever increasing number of $5 charges. Some guy's Medium blog probably isn't worth $5 just like I wouldn't pay $5 for any random show on PBS. But donating to PBS once makes me feel like I'm supporting Frontline, Ken Burns, lots of people I like.
Right. The problem is all the cooperation required. So then what's needed is an open platform that lets people put in their $10, and then sites can choose to implement it. It's a chicken and the egg problem. It hasn't worked in the past, but times change. Instead of looking at this like 3D televisions or VR, the counter example to think about is tablets — (note: human typed emdash) the Apple Newton was a flop, but the iPad is anything but. Or electric cars. The EV1 by GM was a flop and whatever you think about Elon Musk and Tesla, they do exist now. Video calling is another one. The 90's version just didn't work, but I use Facetime almost every day.
The rails exist for micropayments with cryptocurrency, it's "just" going to take the right person and the right software to implement it for it to happen. The problem is money. LEDs that come in blue are foundational to our modern society. Without blue, we'd only have red and green. Unfortunately for him, the inventor of the blue LED, the man who poured his everything into making it, isn't ridiculously wealthy. For micropayments to happen, some one selfless and not seeking to make a profit on it, need to come along and make it a thing. So I don't know if it'll happen, because ghostty's funding model can't be replicated, but a man can dream.
Oh, but don't you know? If our newspaper is on the same subscription as another newspaper which we don't like, then that means we agree with them in all their radical and dangerous opinions? No, no, no, people want to read only one newspaper, which tells them what to think and how to feel on every subject matter.
That's why streaming services also failed. Imagine Beatles and gangster rap and heavy metal being on the same music platform? Fans would never accept that!
The choral world has survived despite a longtime shortage of castrati.
I'm sure they'll figure something out.
In all seriousness, SATB is mostly a constraint because of how choral composers write their music, not because good music demands it. You can produce beautiful music without all four voice parts being equally represented.
Castrati never mattered for choruses - you just use a large choir of boys. They were important for opera/theater, where you need a single voice with enough power.
I compose music once in a while. I'm now trying to write more in a texture like SSAATB if I want amateurs to sing the music, but it's not as easy to write as SATB or SSAATTBB music.
- If it's an internal project (like migrating from one vendor to another, with no user impact) then it takes as long as I can convince my boss it is reasonable to take.
- If it's a project with user impact (like adding a new feature) then it takes as long as the estimated ROI remains positive.
- If it's a project that requires coordination with external parties (like a client or a partner), then the sales team gets to pick the delivery date, and the engineering team gets to lie about what constitutes an MVP to fit that date.
My issue with the second one is that, as an engineer, I am almost never the one trusted with managing ROI. In r&d this just means your product people expect delivery earlier and earlier, and will accept lower and lower quality if they think it has some return for the product.
Exactly. For many software projects ROI is just not measurable the way it is for more pedestrian products. Sometimes you can estimate the cost of replacing one product with another, and then you can estimate the "value" of enhancements to the current product that keep you from having to spend the cost of replacing it. Other times you can measure happiness of your product's users but not the ROI strictly defined. Other times you can say "this project enabled _that_ project, and that project has a measurable ROI, therefore so does _this_ project". You just can't count on always having a measurable ROI.
So far the only metric I've seen that works is KTLO fraction, where lower is better, because that means with the rest of the time you can be adding value, and that value is socially determinable by asking your peers and users. KTLO fraction can't be gamed because your peer managers will call you out on it if you try to cook it. To drive KTLO fraction down you also have to address tech debt that cause high KTLO fractions, and addressing that tech debt enables value-add because between spending less time on KTLO and having a cleaner architecture/design you enable the addition of valuable features.
Those who currently hold the majority don't want any ranked choice that might undermine their position. Worse, since there are only two parties, the other side is very often seen as deranged, corrupt, and evil, that should be kept away from power with any means short of a nuclear strike.
Only when there is a sizable number of disgruntled voters who are unhappy with both the red and the blue, and would vote for specific decent people, not party affiliation, then RCV has a fir chance of being adopted, I assume.
I wonder if some portion of these come from templates. Maybe there's a patient communication template that includes a telephone emoji, and it gets reused.
Health care workers are in a hurry when writing notes, so I doubt they're consulting their emoji pickers just to make their notes more interesting.
If you want a fast, healthy, balanced meal for $4 or less, the obvious choice in America is a frozen meal (aka TV dinner).
You can microwave it in 4-6 minutes; ingredients are often flash-frozen, locking in nutrients; and food-safety concerns are addressed at scale, rather than in a hit-or-miss way in a tiny storefront.
So perhaps, instead of advocating for more tiny restaurants that would likely need to skimp on safety considerations, we should be advocating for more microwaves available in grocery and convenience stores, so people can select a frozen meal, heat it up, and be on their way.
Not sure I can accept most of your assertions, but anyway, I left America in 2008 and IIRC there were microwaves available in every 7-11 even then?
There were't any $4 healthy bowls of anything, but there were $2 "red hot beef & bean" (& fake soy filler) burritos which hit the spot if you'd failed to find a way to eat real food...
The problem with the microwave solution, I think, is that pretty much only burritos and pasta can be packaged in a microwavable way that still tastes good? And maybe like a few kinds of vegetable side dishes.
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It basically says that the economy works best when ownership of productive property is as diffuse as possible -- when a high percentage of the population has some ownership, and it's not concentrated in the hands of a relatively few wealthy shareholders (in the case of capitalism) or the government (in the case of communism/socialism).
Under distributist principles, I would say that we should pursue economic policies that allow the ownership of productive AI to be widespread, whether that's in the form of cooperatives, employee ownership, or other means of giving the average person access to that ownership. (I acknowledge that it's currently possible to invest in publicly traded AI companies, but would prefer to see other ownership opportunities as well.)
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