I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.
I've been to several retro LAN parties recently. They're wonderful, and they cost nothing to run. 10/100 switches are free, and cat5 nearly so, and the people attending can probably bring plenty of both.
Today is Friday. Send out a group text right now. Saturday evening. Bring whatever. We'll order pizza, it'll be a good time. Make it happen.
Logistically: One was specifically focused on the CDROM era. Any game that shipped on CD or came out roughly 1995-2005 was fair game, and the organizers mentioned a few by name that you might want to pre-install. The other was anything-goes, networking optional; I brought a TI 99/4A and a handful of cartridges, and it was very popular, apparently that grabbed a bunch of folks right in the childhood, in between rounds of Quake.
Whatever the merits or demerits of 'marvelous human experiences' are from the point of view of production and consumption, the OP's conclusion leaves out the important point that Alexander's 'rationalization of forces that define a problem' produces designs that come closer to solving real-life problems (even in production and consumption) than simply putting attractive lipstick on an economic utility pig. If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere.
> If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere.
of course but that's well within the scope of the whole paradigm (as opposed to how it is originally phrased it in relation to a loss of "marvelous human experiences"): if i use a bad tool to solve my customer's problems in an unsatisfactory way then my customers will no longer be my customers (assuming the all knowing guiding hand of the free market). so there's no new observation whatsoever in OP.
Seconded. This was a great read, and led me to a lot of great listening. And some wondering about how far Minutemen would've went if D. Boon hadn't passed so early.
I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY for any startup or community organizer.
Lastly, if you read and you want to learn more about 'The Replacements', 'Trouble Boys', Bob Mehr, is a terrific read.
I agree that the consequences are greater.
There seem to be at least two perspectives on whether wealth makes you different:
1. In 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” and Ernest Hemingway supposedly retorted, “Yes, they have more money.”
2. Kurt Vonnegut's obituary for Joseph Heller...
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
Or, as Cyndi Lauper sang it, 'Money Changes Everything'
I'm of the latter persuasion, that wealth influences one's personality in important ways.
I think the Hemingway line could read two ways. He could be saying there is no difference save for having money. Or, he could be implying money is corrupting and would lead to the same observed behaviors no matter who gets rich.
I lived in Port Orange FL until i was 12, during night launches my dad would take the family to New Smyrna Beach or some where a short drive South where we watched the shuttles come up over the water somehow. I can't remember the details it was a lonnnng time ago haha. I do remember the launches sounding like popcorn popping.
I live in Dallas now and will be turning 50 soon, i want to catch the next Starship launch live but would have to time it perfectly to get time off of work ahead of time.
You probably watched from the Florida side of the intercoastal waterway between the main part of Florida and Cape Canaveral. Because of the 3-mile minimum and Patrick AFB it is pretty hard to find a good watching place that is actually on the cape.
80 miles for me! I was a Space Shuttle era kid though. Saw the Challenger disaster during my lunchtime. And then on perpetual replay for the rest of the week on WESH/WCPX/WFTV most likely. Even still, just knowing we were launching all those people into space was awe-inspiring.
"When whole squadrons of very long-range aircraft were operating out of bases in the Shetlands, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland (and, after mid-1943, the Azores), and when the Bay of Biscay could be patrolled all through the night by aircraft equipped with centimetric radar, Leigh Lights, depth charges, acoustic torpedoes, even rockets, Doenitz’s submarines knew no rest." [0]
[0] Kennedy, Paul. Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War, from the chapter 'How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic'
"”The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican,” - Barack Obama [0]
This is not a statement of Republicans and Democrats being the same, but a statement of Republicans going off the deep end in during and after Reagan.
Obama was a very moderate Democrat for his time. If you go back in time a moderate Democrat and Republican were similar because the "center" was more reasonable. Now the "center" is just people that are ashamed that they vote Republican.
If we accept that, then "government" and "Republicans" would be pretty much synonymous, so my original point stands. (Not that I accept it, but even if I did.)
I think your original point stands; I was not intending to contradict it, only to offer a possible explanation. The Overton window of what is seen as possible and necessary in US policy has shifted from, say, Social Security and Medicare, to tax cuts. IMO, party labels do more to obscure than reveal in these days, whatever the awfulnesses and benefits of either party may be.
I tend to think a job guarantee would work better than UBI: have the government provide a job to anyone who can't find one somewhere else, something like what was done in the 1930's in the US. Come up with a list of things needed (can you think of anything that needs fixing?), and pay people a living wage and benefits to take care of those things. Call it 'Universal Basic Work.'
Beyond spending government money to take care of the country and beyond providing those hired with enough to take take of themselves, it'd force private employers to pay and provide benefits at least as well as the government UBW jobs if they want to hire employees.
I further imagine that a person making enough to get by would be less prone to being hopeless and frustrated, supporting social cohesion. And that there's a dignity in that both for the individual and the community they are a part of.
I like the idea of Universal Basic Work because, like you state, I think from work comes a sense of self-usefulness, utility and ultimately perhaps dignity, self-esteem. I don't see any of that from UBI.
1. The idea behind UBI is that it is near-zero effort, the cost to operate UBI should be minimal. UBW cannot be low overhead I suppose.
2. What motivation do I have to do the work if I can’t get fired?
You have to work if you want to get paid. Otherwise you will get fired. The obligation of the state is to provide you with a guaranteed alternative job offer, not a guaranteed income.
It’s up to you if you take up the state’s offer or not.
The UBI removes the motivation to work and turns everything into volunteering. The result is a rise in the “reservation wage gap” - the amount the private sector has to pay to get people to work for them.
The reservation wage gap with a job guarantee is near zero - which is more economically efficient.
Additionally the job guarantee acts as a powerful spend side automatic stabiliser that is temporal and spatially efficient - which removes the need to manipulate the base interest rate allowing it to return to its natural rate of zero. This allows permanent cheaper mortgages and business loans.
One issue is that there's X% (debatable) of people who can't work for reasons that are complex or hard to explain. For many, even if they are physically able, you kinda don't want them to.
I mean, people who will create negative utility in a workplace or cost more in supervision expense than you get from them as output.
They create hazards for others by being drunk or on drugs on the job, or by harassing or bullying others, injuring themselves or others, causing personality conflicts or dramas due to trauma or unresolved mental health issues etc. I don't mean this as a value judgment, it's just like some people really aren't in a place in life where they can function well in work settings.
I'm not sure how you "guarantee" something that is dependent on complex situational decisions.
That confuses two points. Employees sell labour hours. At the basic living wage those hours are interchangeable between all people offering them. Even to the extent of age or infirmity. That’s what “unskilled labour” means.
The conversion of those hours into labour services is why the private sector is allowed to profit. If they want “better quality hours” then they have to bid up the price of those hours.
That should be market determined, rather than being administratively set as the gap between unemployment benefit and the minimum wage. You’ll be surprised how well the private sector can use hours once they see people doing the basics of turning up on time and doing something.
When we sentence offenders to “community service” we give them a job as rehabilitation, along with all the support mechanisms to straighten out lives. If we can do that for offenders, we can do that for everybody.
There would be overhead in asking people to do something (UBW) rather than simply offering money (UBI). It strikes me that the benefits of being able to limit unemployment directly rather than indirectly, of being able to direct community work that supports all of us, of more people being able to pay their bills instead of wondering how to do so, and of putting a floor under private sector wages and benefits is worth the overhead involved.
I'd note that UBI also requires administrative effort and expense.
> What motivation do I have to do the work if I can’t get fired?
As the other poster described, you've still got to work to get paid. It's a job, not just a paycheck. Another poster described the problems with hiring people who are not able to work. UBW shouldn't replace mental health facilities or jails... although I suspect that it'd reduce the number of people who need either of those facilities. I'd say that both of these types of problems are relatively small compared to the population and to the benefits that a UBW program would provide. Pilot UBW programs might help assess the validity of the above theories.
The government already does this by subsidizing low income earners via the EITC. It just outsources the actual job provision to the private sector, which is an effective alternative to wasteful make-work.
Except that doesn’t work as there remains a systemic shortage of jobs on offer.
The societal deal with the private sector is that it employs everybody at a rate that allows an individual to live in return for the chance to make a profit. A job guarantee ensures that the private sector overall cannot shirk that responsibility.
If the private sector does its job, nobody will be employed on a job guarantee.
An income subsidy does the same thing at lesser cost. Whether that subsidy is a UBI or a wage supplement is to some extent a political choice: we got the EITC instead of a proper UBI (managed as a "negative" income tax bill for low-earning folks) largely due to political objections to the notion of getting money "for doing nothing".
Yet the state pension tells us that isn’t the case. The state pension is a UBI allocated by age rather than physical area. We have millions of data points showing that when people receive sufficient to live on they stop working.
The result is political pressure to remove the state pension or increase the age at which it is received.
If UBI worked as you suggest then the resulting increase in productivity would drive the state pension age down not up.
The evidence is against you. Giving people money reduces productivity and makes it more difficult for firms to get the labour they require, and at huge cost to the state that uses up the finite taxation space there is available.
'We should teach our Students what Industry doesn’t want', Kevin Ryan, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3377814.3381719
'Are you sure your software will not kill anyone?', Nancy Leveson, https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/136281.2
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