Links and Thoughts 19: 4 June 2014
Stevie Wonder Talkbox : Sure, everybody knows Frampton, but Stevie does it just as well.
Good Afternoon.
Economics:
“Curiously, economists don’t tend to find much interest in such questions—really fundamental things about values, for instance, or broader political or social questions about what people’s lives are actually like. They rarely have much to say about them if left to their own devices. It’s only when some non-economist begins proposing social or political explanations for the rise of apparently meaningless administrative and managerial positions, that they jump in and say “No, no, we could have explained that perfectly well in economic terms,” and make something up.
“After my piece came out, for instance, The Economist rushed out a response just a day or two later. It was an incredibly weakly argued piece, full of obvious logical fallacies. But the main thrust of it was: well, there might be far less people involved in producing, transporting, and maintaining products than there used to be, but it makes sense that we have three times as many administrators because globalization has meant that the process of doing so is now much more complicated. You have computers where the circuitry is designed in California, produced in China, assembled in Saipan, put in boxes in some prison in Nevada, shipped through Amazon overnight to God-knows-where… It sounds convincing enough until you really think about it. But then you realize: If that’s so, why has the same thing happened in universities? Because you have exactly the same endless accretion of layer on layer of administrative jobs there, too. Has the process of teaching become three times more complicated than it was in the 1930s? And if not, why did the same thing happen? So most of the economic explanations make no sense.”
Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded: David Graeber explains why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid : Salon
Misc.:
The Food Politics of Pokémon : Modern Farmer
Cities and Citizens:
“It is a user experience where we are the chefs and our city is the restaurant. As planners, we try to create great recipes and menus for our city—mixed-use here, open space there, retail here, and then sprinkle in a little streetscape. Then other chefs, like developers and business owners, come in and use our recipes to create a dish, or developments and neighborhoods. Each restaurant has multiple and unique dishes, just like cities have multiple and unique neighborhoods.”
The Case for Neighborhood Bars : Planetizen
Cities and Citizens:
“Similarly, to every designer who says ‘I talk to the people’ we should say ‘You’re supposed to talk to people!’ The people make our market. Who are we planning, designing, and building for if not the public? Rule number one is to avoid insulting them by calling them idiots, NIMBYs, crackpots, crazies, or the like, in any public forum.”
Placemaking begins and ends with the people: The secret of success for urbanists is to listen more and strive to connect with the folks that we serve.
Tech:
“Those five stages — technical possibility, social adoption, regulatory reaction, civil disobedience, and negotiated settlement — argued Shirky, are likely going to echo throughout the sharing economy over the next few years.”
Finish This Sentence: Napster Is to iTunes as Airbnb Is to What? : Next City
Tech:
Apple’s two-hour WWDC keynote in 10 minutes : The Verge
see also:
“Apple offered features and services to counter Google on nearly every level yesterday, and it’s going to be more than a little interesting to see how Google reacts.”
Apple’s war against Google has finally gotten interesting : Geek.com
##
Today’s Book Recommendation is Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, isbn 9780143114949 (paperback, 2009 reprint)
“With accelerating velocity, our age’s new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don’t have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin’. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d’tre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.”
At today’s rate-of-change, perhaps we need to consider it as a historical document. [myspace! *chuckle*]
I’ll get my to-buy links sorted out eventually. In the meantime, you can still use most readers’ preferred option.
##
Diary entry for 4 June:
and the blog, of course. I should post to that more often (all bloggers say something similar, I've noted)
— Matt Blind (@ProfessorBlind) May 8, 2014It hasn’t been even quite 4 weeks yet since I had that thought, which became an plan, which became a set of posts (sloppy in format; because of that, ‘easy’ in execution) but of course the real problem is that a reliance on links (most people expect those to be served up fresh) means the buffer is, at most, one day.
Still, every batch of would-have-been-tweets that I turn into a blog post makes my site richer, as opposed to Twitter’s.
Jeremy Keith added a neat feature to his site, Adactio — taking the microblogging back to his own blogging platform, with some magic on the back-end to Tweet his short posts — but the notes live on his site, the tweets are just copies. It’s a neat application of available resources, though in-actual-use I don’t know if I’d have the discipline to tweet, um, quite so formally.
Though maybe I should. —M.
[subscribe: rss – twitter]
[bookmark these: http://www.rocketbomber.com/category/links-and-thoughts/]
