STUFF

http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/a-letter-to-the-powerless-and-the-mystified/

Just a note to any Americans visiting the site. For some reason the Republicans have forgotten that Firing Line was one of the socio-cultural catalysts that led to their resurgence in the Eighties. Remember to call your congressmen, and tell them that PBS and NPR is worth more than TWO F-22 Raptors.

You want to know why you have debt crisis? Look at your military spending (decades after the ‘Soviet threat’). Download Why We Fight… If every airforce in the world banded together, you guys would still whup their ass. So what are you preparing for? An alien invasion?

Otherwise, when debating with your buddies, just ask them questions: Why has the middle-class stagnated since Reagan was swept into office (and don’t let the ‘household income’ trick fool you (I’ve actually come across right wing arguments for reinstituting child labour!)), even as the economy as a whole more than doubled in size? Where has all that wealth gone? Why are Western Europeans born in poverty almost twice as likely to realize the ‘American Dream’ than Americans? Why didn’t the Bush era tax cuts generate the magical revenue needed to balance the budget? If ‘aristocracy’ refers to the inheritance of power, and money is power, doesn’t the repeal of inheritance taxes mean that power in America is becoming a matter of inheritance? For that matter, why is social mobility evaporating in the country that claims it as its birthright?

Why are the people who have nothing save their labour, being asked to shoulder the budget balancing burden?

Could it because the people who own all the bullhorns have confused their self-interests with the Universal Good? But humans don’t do that… do they?

Creeping normalcy is your enemy. It all comes down to bargaining power in markets. The less bargaining power you possess, the worse the deal is for you, the better it is for those with bargaining power. Whenever somebody says, “You’re lucky to have a job,” what they are literally saying is “You’re economically powerless – be thankful!”

Whenever somebody says, “Why should the taxpayers fund elections?” what they are literally saying is, “Make government more transparent to market bargaining power!”

Government is ugly, sure, but it’s the only institution that can force those with all the bargaining power to yield to the interests of those without. Most all arguments for ‘shrinking government,’ are arguments for giving more power to the powerful. If you need to compromise overall ‘market efficiency’ to prosecute your interests, then so be it – within limits of course.

Here’s a possible scenario: Since inequities in markets tend to generate greater inequities (as the power bargainers, confusing their conceits for truth, leverage their power into more and more power), the American middle-class will progressively command less and less economic power, and the amorphous sense of communal discontent will slowly simmer and simmer until it reaches a boil. The power bargainers will marshal their resources (the labour of the powerless) in various attempts to redirect this discontent away from themselves and toward internal (ie, the ‘Government’) or external (ie, ‘radical Islam’) threats, which is to say, in ways that happily, coincidentally, maximize their bargaining power.

This, I think, has been the status quo. The million dollar sociological question, for me, is one of how long it can be sustained. Is there enough in the way of bread and circuses to keep siphoning the bulk of economic growth to the powerful in perpetuity?

I don’t think so. The concentration of power typically seems to lead to abuses. Markets require a plurality of competitors to function efficiently. The problem is that competition is expensive, which means that the powerful face an inexorable statistical tendency to collude, to minimize competition(and so render their power independent of the vagaries of consumption), and thus to short circuit the markets that were the original basis of their power. Market economies, in other words, are all threatened by the tendency to congeal into multiple industry-specific centrally-planned subeconomies. Ordinarily this would lead to gross inefficiencies and to crisis, and to some kind of mobilization of the powerless to fascistic or revolutionary ends.

But information technology could very well be a game changer.

What do you guys think?

In the meantime, UNIONIZE – especially if you’re in the service industry. You can’t offshore many services. This is the only way I can see to return economic bargaining power to the masses, and so right the listing economic ship. Unions may be ugly as all hell close up, but the further you step back, the better looking they become.

What other options are there?

http://i.imgur.com/yTeun.gif

MICHAEL JACKSON


http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lgtx335dXv1qzr82xo1_500.jpg

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_le7tzvNhY91qzmopno1_500.jpg

man i don't want to read that shit it's so fucking depressing

what's the immigration like for dope smoking slackers

http://pics.kuvaton.com/kuvei/kill_your_brother.gif

that is awesome

http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/why-cant-a-man-be-more-like-a-woman/

Women are often encouraged to move into male dominated activities, such as engineering. This is not because overall interest in engineering appears to be lacking, but because women’s interest seems to be less than men’s. This is arguably for cultural reasons, so it is argued that culture is inhibiting women from pursuing careers that they may be otherwise suited to and happy with.

If the symptom is that women do less engineering than men, why do we always encourage women to do more engineering, rather than encouraging men to do less? It seems we think men are presently endowed with the perfect level of engineering interest, and women should feel the same, but are impaired by culture.

This could make sense. For instance, perhaps all humans somehow naturally have the socially optimal level of engineering interest, but then insidious cultural influences eat away those interests in women. I think this is roughly how many people model the situation.

This model seems unlikely to be anywhere near the truth. Culture is packed with influences. These influences are not specific to inhibiting women’s impulses to do supposedly masculine things. They tell everyone what sort of people engineers are supposed to be, how much respect a person will get for technical abilities, how much respect they get for wealth, which interests will be taken to indicate the personal qualities they wish to express, which personal qualities are good to express, which cities are most attractive to live in, etc etc etc. Everyone’s level of inclination to be an engineer is significantly composed of cultural influences.

A cacophony of cultural influences may somehow culminate in a socially optimum level of interest in engineering of course. But it is hard to believe that some spectacular invisible mechanism orchestrates this perfect equilibrium for all cultural influences, except those that are gender specific. If there are fleets of rogue cultural influences sabotaging women’s inclinations, this must cast suspicion on the optimality of all other less infamous cultural influences.

Besides the incredible unlikelihood that all cultural influences except gender related ones culminate in a socially optimal level of interest in a given activity, it just doesn’t look like that’s what’s going on. Socially optimal cultural influences would mainly correct for externalities, for instance encouraging activities which help others beyond what the doer would be compensated. But this is not the criterion we use for dealing out respect. It may be part of it, or related to it, but for instance we generally do not respect mothers as much as CEOs, though many people would accept both that mothers have huge benefits often for little compensation and that CEOs are paid more than they are worth. We respect the CEO more probably because it is more impressive to be a CEO.

Incidentally, the correction of cultural influences is another example of expressing pro-female sympathy by encouraging females to do manly things. It seems here we accept that many male jobs are higher status than many female jobs, so to give women more status we would like them to do more of these jobs. Notice that while more men operate garbage trucks, there is less encouragement for women to do that. But my main point here is that we are obsessed with equalising the few cultural influences which are related to gender, while ignoring the sea of other influences which may misdirect both genders equally.

If a gender gap only tells us that either men or women or both have the wrong level of interest in engineering, and we don’t know what the right level is, trying to move women’s interest to equal men’s seems about as likely to be an improvement as it is a deterioration, except to the extent people like equality for its own sake, or where the cultural influences have other effects, such as making women feel less capable or worthy. If we are really concerned about people finding places in the world which suit them and let them make a worthy contribution, we should probably focus on other influences too, rather than being mesmerised by the unfairness of a politically salient discrepancy in influence.

So when people motivate their concern about a gender gap with the thought that there might for instance be capable and potentially interested women out there, missing their calling to be engineers, I can’t feel this is a pressing problem. Without investigating the rest of the cultural influences involved, there might just as easily be capable and potentially interested men out there missing their calling to not be engineers. Or perhaps (as I suspect) both genders should be engineers more often than men are, or more rarely than women are.

lots of creativity in this thread.

The 7 Greatest (Real) Bill Murray Stories Ever Told (http://www.ranker.com/list/the-7-greatest-_real_-bill-murray-stories-ever-told/kristin-wong)

http://cheezpictureisunrelated.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/072595bc-e0d8-4f09-b7bd-55eceb54d057.jpg

Mr. Hannah Montana's Achy Broken Heart (http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201103/billy-ray-cyrus-mr-hannah-montana-miley?printable=true)

"Kurt Cobain had just died, and that really had an impact on me. He was one of those guys that became a friend to me that I never expected. We met at a venue one night, some big coliseum somewhere—his rig was pulling out and mine was pulling in—and I was standing in the shadows, 1 a.m. in the morning, and he's 'Hey man, congratulations—you pissed the whole world off.' We shook hands, and I said, 'Thanks, man... I love what you all do.'" After that, Cobain congratulated him at an awards ceremony when most of his peers did not. "We crossed paths a couple more times," says Cyrus, "and then I was in St. Louis..."

http://cheezpictureisunrelated.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/wtf-photos-videos-thats-how-i-remember-it.jpg

I guess Mr. Meth was late to the party, figures.

http://davidcameronpretendingtobecommon.tumblr.com/