https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/01/fran-lebowitz-on-race-and-racism The way to approach it, I think, is not to ask, “What would it be like to be black?” but to seriously consider what it is like to be white. That’s something white people almost never think about. And what it is like to be white is not to say, “We have to level the playing field,” but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so […]
“The question we need to ask is not, “How should we create a centrist bulwark against populism?”, but “How can we give progressive shape to people’s disaffection?”” source
https://electology.org/blog/fargo-nd-makes-history-first-us-city-implement-approval-voting Fargo just voted in a new voting system. “Approval Voting”. The text of the measure is here: https://reformfargo.org/ballot-initiative Article 11 – Election procedures MethodologyCity officials will be elected so that each voter may vote for all the candidates the voter approves of in each race. Candidates receiving the most votes will be elected until all necessary seats are filled in each race. Ballot instructionsFor each race to elect city officials, the instructions on the ballot will […]
“MICHAEL HUDSON: I think what the newspapers said was that the bailout saved the banks. To bankers, their banks are the economy. The problem is, you can’t save the banks and the economy. If you save the banks, you’re saving all the debt that people owe to the banks. And if you save all the debt that the people owe to the banks – and you foreclose on the millions of families that forfeited their […]
“MICHAEL HUDSON: I think what the newspapers said was that the bailout saved the banks. To bankers, their banks are the economy. The problem is, you can’t save the banks and the economy. If you save the banks, you’re saving all the debt that people owe to the banks. And if you save all the debt that the people owe to the banks – and you foreclose on the millions of families that forfeited their […]
It’s common to hear defenses of the liberal arts framed in economic terms. How the MFA is the new MBA etc. This is a mistake. To frame it all using economics is a losing battle. University is much more than “job training”. Most young people will move through many different kinds of jobs in their lives. What they need is to discover their own minds, what they are good at, what they aren’t, to learn […]
https://bigthink.com/videos/3-great-untruths-to-stop-telling-kids-and-ourselves there’s some systems that get stronger if they get pushed around, knocked around. … It turns out kids are anti-fragile and when we protect children from unpleasantness, from conflicts, from insults, from teasing, from exclusion, we’re preventing their social psychology, we’re preventing their social abilities, we’re preventing their strength from developing. … There are some systems that have to get pushed around, and Taleb wrote this book ‘Antifragile’ or antifragility because things like the […]
I love reading and thinking about alternative voting systems. Why? I think it’s the counterintuitive notion that making collective decisions is not the same as making individual decisions. There is no perfect system and each system can fail and produce a paradox. But there are more sophisticated systems that what we are used to. They are a bit complex but generally would aggregate our collective preferences well. Some of the most interesting variants are considered […]
Is it strange to be as interested in alternative voting mechanism as I am? Part of me just thinks that this winner take all system is like being in the democratic dark ages. If the goal is collective decision making, winner take all is really lame. There are better ways (but there is no perfect way). Here is a strange idea about Continuous Elections For a variety of reasons, I think it a good idea […]
This is brilliant https://www.monkeon.co.uk/gifaanisqatsi/ It doesn’t make much sense unless you have seen (and loved) the original movie Koyaanisqatsi directed by Godfrey Reggio. Reggio also directed a short video called “Evidence” that I show all my students, I absolutely love it.