647 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2017
  2. Apr 2017
    1. Of course, if you want to put a positive spin on this kind of work, you can call it flexible, decentralized micro-entrepreneurship. But pan out, and it looks more like feudalism, with thousands of small subsistence farmers paying tribute to a baron that grants them access to land they don’t own.
  3. Mar 2017
    1. 沒有看到許委員的『數位經濟基本法』原始草案全文。在討論過程中有一些問題,例如數位經濟的基本定義;對資料產業沒有處理,以至於詹先生對國家保存資料的想像可能低估技術、行政程序,導致不恰當地反映在資料保存相關條文等處,不曉得是否有修正與否。

    1. Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Financial Services, launched a new webpage dedicated to tracking President Trump’s destructive actions against consumers, investors, and the economy.

    1. The native economy refuses to die

      Way before white men ventured into the Arctic, the indigenous people had a perfectly functioning economy of their own. They did not need wages or paper money to do business. They relied on what the environment around them provided, working for food and trading furs. In the 1920s, when scientists and researchers began coming north it led to the introduction of reindeer husbandry as a way to feed the influx of people. This “did not work well with Inuit herders on the north slope, since their labors supported people who did far less work, but still paid through shares of meat and hides” (82). There was a divide between the reindeer community and the genuine Inuit which caused major strife in the economy. Many Inuit “pointed to fur trapping as offering more fulfillment and dignity [than herding reindeer], even though it required similar commitments of labor and time…The private fur trade thus remained an escape from state-sponsored colonialism” (82). However, despite their best efforts to stay true to their native economy, in the 1940s, “herding and harvesting reindeer appeared as more stable than animal life cycles and the global fur trade” (84). But this is not the farthest extent to which southerners took over the land and economy of the Arctic. “Even if Inuit did not imagine themselves within the world being created by southerners, they could hardly avoid participating in it. While the United States and Canada established an Arctic oil economy, the world Inuit had built deteriorated. In the 1950s, fur-bearing creatures became harder to find, markets for fur evaporated, and the Hudson’s Bay Company converted its Arctic fur posts from fur trade centers to retail outlets. For both outsiders and Inuit, the 1950s were a turning point, when the machines and methods of colonialism became the vehicles of cultural survival” (91). There was no longer a market that could support a lifestyle of only hunting and trapping. The indigenous people had to leave that way of life behind and take up wage jobs in the industrial system.

      Annotation drawn from Stuhl, Andrew. Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

  4. Dec 2016
    1. The share of state-owned and state-controlled companies contributing to gross national product increased from 35 percent in the early 2000s to 70 percent now.

      Did not know Putin has substantially re-socialized the Russian economy.

    1. Last year, we saw the worst performance of the global economy since 2009 and the consequential slackening of our external trade

      Because HKD is pegged with USD, and the strong dollar weakened the competitiveness of HK goods and services.

    1. On the thinking of Trump supporters, particularly in Louisiana. Similar to what I've read elsewhere, they tend to view wealth as a virtue. Those who still belong to the vanishing middle class look down on "big-government handouts". But those in the struggling working class are willing to accept needed assistance -- as long as it is only going to "real Americans".

  5. Sep 2016
    1. the automatic collection of students’ data through interactions with educational technologies as a part of their established and expected learning experiences raises new questions about the timing and content of student consent that were not relevant when such data collection required special procedures that extended beyond students’ regular educational experiences of students

      Useful reminder. Sounds a bit like “now that we have easier access to data, we have to be particularly careful”. Probably not the first reflex of most researchers before they start sending forms to their IRBs. Important for this to be explicitly designated as a concern, in IRBs.

    1. frame the purposes and value of education in purely economic terms

      Sign of the times? One part is about economics as the discipline of decision-making. Economists often claim that their work is about any risk/benefit analysis and isn’t purely about money. But the whole thing is still about “resources” or “exchange value”, in one way or another. So, it could be undue influence from this way of thinking. A second part is that, as this piece made clear at the onset, “education is big business”. In some ways, “education” is mostly a term for a sector or market. Schooling, Higher Education, Teaching, and Learning are all related. Corporate training may not belong to the same sector even though many of the aforementioned EdTech players bet big on this. So there’s a logic to focus on the money involved in “education”. Has little to do with learning experiences, but it’s an entrenched system.

      Finally, there’s something about efficiency, regardless of effectiveness. It’s somewhat related to economics, but it’s often at a much shallower level. The kind of “your tax dollars at work” thinking which is so common in the United States. “It’s the economy, silly!”

    1. the use of data in scholarly research about student learning; the use of data in systems like the admissions process or predictive-analytics programs that colleges use to spot students who should be referred to an academic counselor; and the ways colleges should treat nontraditional transcript data, alternative credentials, and other forms of documentation about students’ activities, such as badges, that recognize them for nonacademic skills.

      Useful breakdown. Research, predictive models, and recognition are quite distinct from one another and the approaches to data that they imply are quite different. In a way, the “personalized learning” model at the core of the second topic is close to the Big Data attitude (collect all the things and sense will come through eventually) with corresponding ethical problems. Through projects vary greatly, research has a much more solid base in both ethics and epistemology than the kind of Big Data approach used by technocentric outlets. The part about recognition, though, opens the most interesting door. Microcredentials and badges are a part of a broader picture. The data shared in those cases need not be so comprehensive and learners have a lot of agency in the matter. In fact, when then-Ashoka Charles Tsai interviewed Mozilla executive director Mark Surman about badges, the message was quite clear: badges are a way to rethink education as a learner-driven “create your own path” adventure. The contrast between the three models reveals a lot. From the abstract world of research, to the top-down models of Minority Report-style predictive educating, all the way to a form of heutagogy. Lots to chew on.

  6. Aug 2016
    1. For Democrats, with their coalition increasingly split along class lines, this is looking more and more like the one issue that can keep the party coalition together

      Are the class lines smooth? This statement seems insufficient to describe complexity of the split.

  7. Jul 2016
    1. Within the workings of the informal economy bullying and violence is rife. The harshness of these conditions, and the sword of damocles of deportation, is precisely why this labour is so cheap, and so many businesses opt for it. Bullying makes workers subservient, and scares them away from industrial organising (although there are now amazing unions now fighting for workers in these sectors - the IWGB, IWW, and UVW.) It is not just those businesses that do well out of this exploitation. It makes things cheaper for everyone, and oils the cogs of the whole economy. Many people are happy to reap this work’s benefits without ever taking responsibility for the suffering it causes. 
    1. Uber is synonymous with its “surge pricing” policy—when cars are scarce and rides in high demand, users are warned that the cost of a ride may be much higher than normal. It’s then up to them whether to pay the premium or find another way to get where they’re going.
    1. The showdown in Austin highlights a paradox for cities and citizens as peer-to-peer platforms like Uber and Lyft extend their operations. Their wide-reaching outreach campaigns mimic the style of local politics, waging attacks and appealing to and seeking our support as “constituents.” But in practice, their actions don’t necessarily represent our best interests.
    1. The locals refer to Tepito as the Barrio Bravo, the fierce neighborhood, for its reputation of criminality involving counterfeit goods, robbery, and drug selling.
    1. Luca and his colleagues found requests with African American sounding names were roughly 16 percent less likely to be accepted than their white-sounding counterparts. They found discrimination across the board: among cheap listings and expensive listings, in diverse neighborhoods and homogenous neighborhoods, and with novice hosts as well as experienced hosts. They also found that black hosts were also less likely to accept requests from guests with African American-sounding names than with white-sounding ones.
  8. Apr 2016
    1. The term ‘Middle Ring’ was coined by Marc Dunkelman in his excellent 2014 book on the evolution, or should I say the de-evolution of the American neighborhood, “The Vanishing Neighbor.” In his book Dunkelman introduces the concept of the Middle Ring. The Middle Ring is what Dunkelman calls our neighborly relationships. This is in contrast to the inner-ring of family and close friends, and the ever-expanding outer-ring relationships fostered by the digital age and social media.
    2. My goal is to create a pragmatic road to societal change through direct civic involvement using the efforts of local businesses and their customers as the conduit for volunteerism. The Norwegian have a word for this, Gugnad: “Unpaid voluntary, orchestrated community work.” I call this Community 3.0.  A year later I’m thirteen posts in with about ten left. This post, catalyzed by the Walmart closures, kind of serves as recap of the first two sections.
    1. By valuing capital gains above all others, we end up extracting the value of our marketplaces and rendering them incapable of generating economic activity. As a Deloitte study showed, corporate profits over net worth have been decreasing for 75 years. Corporations are great at accumulating capital, but terrible at deploying it. They vacuum the money off the playing field altogether, impoverishing the markets and consumers–not to mention the employees–on whom they ultimately depend.
  9. Mar 2016
    1. Since the mid 1960s and the explosion of electronics, telephony, and the computer chip, corporate profit over net worth has been declining. This doesn’t mean that corporations have stopped making money. Profits in many sectors are still going up. But the most apparently successful companies are also sitting on more cash — real and borrowed — than ever before. Corporations have been great at extracting money from all corners of the world, but they don’t really have great ways of spending or investing it. The cash does nothing but collect.
    1. I'm talking about optimizing the economy for the velocity of money rather than for the conversion of money into capital. It's going from a growth model to a flow model. Why are we, for instance, taxing capital gains at almost nothing but taxing dividends and earnings so high? That's a tax policy that is meant to favor the extraction of capital and to punish the exchange of things.
    1. vulgar monetary gain...

      I think it is more in terms of "vulgar prestige gain" and how we extract value by promoting a cult of personality around community leaders which in turn increases the prestige value. Reminds me of corporations buying back their own stock in order to concentrate wealth in the hands of stockholders aka executives with stock options. Employees could be paid better wages and in turn could fuel the economy by buying more, but that is not how it works because it does not benefit those who own the capital.

    1. In 2007, there was no difference in reported average stress levels between those who earned more and those who earned less than $50,000, with both groups reporting the same average levels of stress (6.2 on a 10-point scale). By 2014, a clear gap had emerged with those living in lower-income households reporting higher overall stress levels than those living in higher-income households (5.2 vs. 4.7 on the 10-point scale).

      Seems as if the shape the economy is in plays a factor in stress levels between lower class and upper class people otherwise lower class is usually more stressed about money. I can incorporate this into my paper by using demonstrations of families (adults) that have stress compared to other's that don't feel as much.

  10. Feb 2016
    1. It’s not just in America that this practice is increasing. In Europe, it’s called the “zero hour” job — you’re promised work, but guaranteed nothing. And these contracts have been causing controversy in Britain ever since the financial crisis, which saw a dramatic rise in the number of just-in-time jobs as employers offloaded their risks onto the workforce. Today, almost 2 million jobs in the U.K. are now on-call. In some cases, workers are denied the benefits of full-time employees, or are prevented from finding other paying gigs without the permission of their employer — even if that employer cancels all of their shifts.
  11. Jan 2016
    1. Chelsea Rustrum

      The term "sharing economy" was stolen a few years ago, by firms that aren't sharing anything.

      The technology of these platforms is not expensive to build. Meanwhile, these companies have skyrocketing valuations (exceeding even the growth trajectory of Facebook) because they are absorbing value from the people actually creating and providing the value.

      Everyone on the Internet is being exploited without noticing.

      "Our personal data is not unlike labor -- you don’t lose by giving it away, but if you don’t get anything back you’re not receiving what you deserve. Information ... is inherently valuable."

      An economy where workers get fair exchange for the value they produce is possible. Rustrum points out these means:

      • Cooperatives. In particular, platform coops
      • ESOP, employee stock ownership plans
      • Crowd funding
      • Blockchain - digital peer-to-peer secure transactions
    1. A “sharing economy,” by definition, is lateral in structure. It is a peer-to-peer economy. But Uber, as its name suggests, is hierarchical in structure. It monitors and controls its drivers, demanding that they purchase services from it while guiding their movements and determining their level of earnings. And its pricing mechanisms impose unpredictable costs on its customers, extracting greater amounts whenever the data suggests customers can be compelled to pay them.This is a top-down economy, not a “shared” one.

      The true sharing economy is about things like sharing unused tools and resources, community property, and combining purchasing power. (People should not say "there is no such thing" when pointing out that Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb are not examples.)

  12. Dec 2015
    1. Users publish coursework, build portfolios or tinker with personal projects, for example.

      Useful examples. Could imagine something like Wikity, FedWiki, or other forms of content federation to work through this in a much-needed upgrade from the “Personal Home Pages” of the early Web. Do see some connections to Sandstorm and the new WordPress interface (which, despite being targeted at WordPress.com users, also works on self-hosted WordPress installs). Some of it could also be about the longstanding dream of “keeping our content” in social media. Yes, as in the reverse from Facebook. Multiple solutions exist to do exports and backups. But it can be so much more than that and it’s so much more important in educational contexts.

    1. The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be called "sucker populism."

      This accelerated hard with Ronald Reagan. The theory that lower taxes and deregulation will be good for everyone sounds sensible. But the wealthy don't care about the common welfare. They only care about amassing more wealth and power.

  13. Nov 2015
    1. BitSource would like to hire a second class of coders at the beginning of the new year. He, Parrish, and Hall want to fill up their buildings, create an incubator for entrepreneurs, a makerspace for craftsmen, and, someday, if they play their cards incredibly well, a bonafide Pikeville tech scene. You know, make Bloomberg in his smart suit eat crow for once.

      https://www.bitsourceky.com/ https://twitter.com/bitsourceky BitSource - agile software and web development. Pikeville, Kentucky Founders Rusty Justice and M. Lynn Parrish

    2. Outsiders have never gotten Appalachia — or else, they get the version they want: the one with the meth and Mountain Dew mouth, the incest, the painkillers, the welfare, all captured by journalists parachuting in for their regular dose of poverty porn. They find the toothless guy, the trailers with shotguns racked up on the wall and the yard strewn with diapers and beer cans, and they film some dude saying weird shit in a backcountry accent that needs subtitles to comprehend, they give it an ominous title like “A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains,” and they leave. You bet people here have a chip on their shoulder. It’s not that stuff like that doesn’t exist—but if the world always insisted on zooming in on your warts, you’d be resentful, too.
    1. Infrastructures, for Collier, are amixture of political rationality, administrative techniques, and material systems, and his interest isnot in infrastructure per se but in what it tells us about practices of government. Soviet electricityprovision, through this lens, is analyzed for how it reveals a system of total planning in a commandeconomy rather than for what it tells us about the effects of electricity on users in Russia.

      It's never really about what is in front of us when it comes to politics.. there is always more to it.. His theory is a tool we could study to learn about a country/society's government by looking at the infrastructure they've created.

    1. In a sense, employers and employees used to be married to each other, and there was a sense of commitment and a joined destiny. Now, employers just want a bunch of one-night stands with their employees, a promiscuousness that promises to be not only fleeting but destabilizing to the broader macroeconomy. Set to replace the crumbling New Deal society is a darker world in which wealthy and powerful economic elite are collaborating with their political cronies to erect the policy edifice that allows them to mold their proprietary workforce into one composed of a disjointed collection of 1099 employees.
  14. Oct 2015
    1. Adam Smith, the great economist, when he was thinking about what makes forcivil, kind, cooperative societies, said that gratitude is really the glue that ties peopletogether. If you move forward a couple of centuries we encounter Trivers, the greatevolutionary thinker who was making the case that altruism and sharing and generosity ofthe reciprocal kind that takes place between two individuals is really driven by feelingsof gratitude, of having a sense that other people are giving to you
  15. Sep 2015
    1. Business, Economy Standard & Poor’s Lowers Ratings for Five Peru Banks September 14, 2015 2:07 pm·0 commentsViews: 118 Standard & Poor’s lowered its rating for five Peruvian banks, which points towards a more difficult economic environment for the Andean nation,

      The agency gave lowered the rating from BBB to BBB- for Banco de Credito del Peru, the country’s largest bank, as well as Banco Interamericano de Finanzas (BanBif), BBVA Banco Continental, MiBanco and Interbank, according to Gestion.

      Standard & Poor’s gave a stable outlook for BCP, BBVA, MiBanco and Interbank, while it gave a negative outlook for BanBif.

      “This lower note reflects our opinion of greater economic risks for banks that operate in Peru, which ratifies our perspective on the growth of Peru,” Standard & Poor’s said. “We believe that the trajectory of the country won’t be consistently above its peers with a similar economic development.”

      The agency’s decision follows months of weak growth in Peru, although there are also signs of an economic recovery going into the second half of 2015, thanks to increased mineral production and the start of construction on infrastructure projects. In July, Peru’s copper production rose almost 30% compared to the same month in 2014, according to the Mines and Energy Ministry. Copper is Peru’s top export.

      Late last month, Standard & Poor’s reaffirmed its long-term foreign currency rating for Peru at BBB+ and its long-term local currency rating of A-, with stable outlooks.

      The agency said in a statement that it was expecting Peru’s economic growth to expand on average at 3.7% per year from 2015 to 2018, which is still robust compared to many countries but far slower than the previous decade when annual growth was about 6%.

      “The stable outlook reflects our view that Peru remains well placed to conduct some countercyclical policy and can manage a widening of its current account deficit and some increase in external debt despite potential local and global market volatility ahead of the 2016 presidential elections and a more challenging global backdrop,” the agency said.

      Finance Minister in New York to appeal to MSCI

      Meanwhile, Peru’s Finance minister, Alonso Segura, is in New York today to convince Morgan Stanley’s Capital International division, MSCI, to reconsider its downgrading of the Lima Stock Exchange from Emerging to Frontier.

      Segura is in New York with the chairman of the Central Bank, Julio Velarde, as well as Lilian Rocca, superinendent of the stock market; Christian Laub, president of the Lima Stock Exchange; and Francis Stenning, president of Cavali, the securities and settlements registry.

  16. www.minneapolisfed.org www.minneapolisfed.org
    1. monetary economies can be viewed as merely large interlocking networks of gifts
  17. Apr 2015
    1. There are several other important considerations related to LEB. First, there is a risk of capture of legislation by the domestic industry. Once an inefficient industry comes to rely on LEB for survival, the Ukrainian parliament might find it difficult to rescind the ban in the future. Second, LEB and other similar measures underscore that the Ukrainian parliament finds it acceptable to intervene in functioning of the markets based on empirically dubious rationale. The parliament substitutes the market by deciding how resources should be allocated. In doing so, the parliament teaches the businesses and the industry that they should compete through lobbying in the parliament, financial and informational, rather than through innovation and efficiency improvement in the market place.
  18. Mar 2015
    1. You can expect to pay 50 cents a day. Or try DIY. This is where you will own your content.

      Rent to own?

      There is no ownership while we rent.

      We either own or increase our freedom of movement in and out of rental environments...or both.

  19. Feb 2014
    1. Fisher outlines three trends : (1) the increasing number of citizens owning , or employed by owners of , intellectual property; (2) the United States’ economic position as an increasingly net exporter of intellectual property; and (3) the increasing investment companies have made in intellectual property in terms of research, development, brand - establishment, etc. (1999, Sect. II. A.).
      • increasing number of owners of intellectual property

      • strong economic position including exports of intellectual property

      • increase in investments by companies in intellectual property

    2. Ladas and Parry note that patent law originated in a manufacturing economy when patents were beginning to acquire new importance , and that patents have increased in popularity along with the rise of the economy (2009, n. pag.)