Weekly Shaarli
Week 51 (December 17, 2012)
The one where Orson Scott Card calls for the overthrow of any government which licenses same-sex marriage.
“… as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative.” Aaron Swartz will always be a hero of mine for that time he almost freed five million articles from JSTOR.
Bitcoin is not about making rapid global transactions with little or no fee. Bitcoin is about preventing monetary tyranny. That is its raison d’être.
Some interesting thoughts on lifespan and population size.
I spent three months hiking the northern half of the Appalachian Trail in 2011, covering 1,200 miles from Harper’s Ferry, WV, to the end of the trail on Mt. Katahdin in Maine. I returned in 2012 to hike the southern half (~1,000 miles). I hiked the entire distance in two pairs of Crocs-brand shoes. This page includes the trail reports I periodically made via email, an annotated interactive map, and other info.
Haha. Oh, rich people, you so rich.
An easy to read introduction to the theory of firms. Of course firms do not need to be ‘hierarchical organizations that are internally directed by command and control.’ They could be cooperatively owned and operated by the workers.
The game of Monopoly has its origins in a game meant to demonstrate the principles of Georgism.
“Veblen put forth a basic distinction between the productiveness of ‘industry’ run by skilled engineers, which manufactures real goods of utility, and the parasitism of ‘business,’ which exists only to make profits for a leisure class which engages in ‘conspicuous consumption’. The only economic contribution by the leisure class is ‘economic waste’, activities that contribute negatively to productivity. By implication, Veblen saw the US economy as being made inefficient and corrupt by men of ‘business’ who deviously put themselves in an indispensable position in society.”
‘The key move in Judge Jacobs’ opinion is concluding that sexual orientation is a “quasi-suspect” class justifying intermediate scrutiny. This requires the federal government to show that its policy is substantially related to an important governmental interest.’
About Aaron Swartz’s run-in with JSTOR and MIT
The state of mobile privacy and encryption
The Seattle airport has a downstairs area away from restaurants with benches, tables, and [a few] outlets.
“More than a decade ago, Daniel Suelo closed his bank account and moved into a desert cave. Here’s how he eats, sleeps, and evades the law.” Some day I will buy an acre of desert and live kind of like this guy — only with more computers.
The city of Clearwater, FL, is set to criminalize homelessness. They’re looking at both a daytime ban on sitting and a nighttime ban on sleeping.
He describes the movement by five main values: Distributed network architectures, transnationality, economic democracy, hacker ethics, and devolutionism (returning all products back to the commons). Sounds about right.
Looks like a good introduction to Georgism
The Oatmeal explains why people who want to buy content pirate it instead.
Nice quote of Jefferson on patents
I can see no point in this except to disrupt the activist groups who use the service.
A friend organized a project to crochet hats for the homeless (or other cold people) this winter. She gave us a simple hat pattern to learn, and these notes are my attempt to make sense of it and explain to other beginning crocheters
Don’t you just hate it when homeless people are always existing somewhere?
Wendy McElroy on Georgism
Part II: http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/06/21/the-single-tax-a-refutation/comment-page-1/
What we need more of is cooperatives.
While I obviously disagree that economic rent is ever a good thing, this is a well presented introduction to rent-seeking. I also liked the same author’s (Dr. Ross) article presenting the classical-liberal view of the state (http://www.friesian.com/freestat.htm). There seem to be many interesting articles on this website.
Mike Leung and David Ellerman’s page about wage slavery and worker cooperatives.
They don’t denounce what the state does, they just object to who’s doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don’t quibble over their coercers’ credentials. If you can’t pay or don’t want to, you don’t much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.