Links, Monday 29th Dec

This is a simple point, but a very useful one to make. People on the left, who I consider allies, are often instinctively hostile to pricing and I think this is a mistake. Pricing can help us use limited resources more efficiently, which benefits everyone. HOWEVER, these efficiency gains can only be realised if there is sufficient equality in cash incomes. I'm inclined to think the best possible formula would be a generous universal basic income funded out of general taxation (firmly a left-wing view), combined with quite a lot more pricing than we have now (generally considered a right-wing view). Vox

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There's some cool stuff in the world. Cracked

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"We cannot know if the cotton industry was the only possible way into the modern industrial world, but we do know that it was the path to global capitalism. We do not know if Europe and North America could have grown rich without slavery, but we do know that industrial capitalism and the Great Divergence in fact emerged from the violent caldron of slavery, colonialism, and the expropriation of land." Chronicle

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The second in our series on logistics and shipping. First entry was pallets; now barrels.

"The barrel, Work points out, is a far from simple idea. Many civilisations came up with buckets, probably first by hollowing out logs and then by binding slats of wood together, but barrels tapered at both ends seem only to have been devised by Northern European Celts." Spectator

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"In the Western world, the front crawl was first seen in a swimming race held in 1844 in London, where it was swum by Native North Americans. The Anishinaabe Flying Gull and Tobacco easily defeated all the British breaststroke swimmers. English gentlemen, however, considered this style, with its considerable splashing, to be barbarically "un-European" and the British continued to swim only the breaststroke in competition." Wikipedia

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""If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students," Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don't enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good." NPR

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"the automobile and the elevator have been locked in a “secret war” for over a century, with cars making it possible for people to spread horizontally, encouraging sprawl and suburbia, and elevators pushing them toward life in dense clusters of towering vertical columns." Boston Globe

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"To be considered ‘vulnerable’ in this investigation they had to fulfill one of the criteria, of which working in a brothel was one, which labeled the whole group as ‘vulnerable’. Other criteria were having an economically disadvantaged position (not speaking English, not having had an education), having a disadvantaged social position (being an illegal immigrant for example), being wrongly informed (it was sufficient if you were working in a different city than had been agreed on) or having been abused/having been forced (was found only rarely). Four of these criteria were enough to be considered a ‘victim of human trafficking’ in this report, regardless of whether you actually were a victim of human trafficking. 11% of the women included in the investigation complied to these criteria. Next, this percentage was raised considerably based on preconceptions (“this has to be too low, in reality there must be more women from vulnerable countries”) and the results were presented to the world: thousands of victims of human trafficking in the UK! They hadn’t found even one…"

Marijke Vonk

Links, Sunday 21st Dec

This is utterly disgusting. BBC

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WTAF

"There will also be a €600 fine for showing a lack of respect to anyone in uniform" RT

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"Forbes awarded the humble dabba-wallahs a 6 Sigma performance rating, a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness is 99.9999999 or more. In other words, for every six million tiffins delivered, only one fails to arrive. This error rate means in effect that a tiffin goes astray only once every two months.

It is a rare day indeed when a customer's deep-fried rotis fail to turn up. The sigma rating was the same as that given to the top bluechip company Motorola - not bad considering that most dabba-wallahs are illiterate." Guardian

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Well done. Huff Post

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This is a good one. All cops are bastards, so let's just not have any. Rolling Stone

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Incredible story about the sheer scale of air pollution in Beijing. Guardian

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Such good work at the demo last night: marching to commemorate sex workers who have been killed in the past year, and to fight creeping criminalisation in the UK. Vice

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Amazing that, in some ways, we're still technologically behind the Romans. iO9

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I keep thinking that basic income is probably *the* most important political project of our generation. Let's try make it happen!

"To appreciate the full extent of the emancipation, one should hear the story of the young women who at first wore veils and were reluctant to offend their elders when having their photographs taken to obtain eligibility for the basic income. Within months, they had confidence enough to be sitting and chatting in the centre of the village unveiled. They had their bit of independence." Guardian

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Very nice overview of the electricity situation in South Africa, along with some usefully specific policy proposals at the end. Daily Maverick

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"When we talk about diversity and inclusion, we necessarily position marginalized groups as naturally needing to assimilate into dominant ones, rather than to undermine said structures of domination. Yes, we need jobs; we need education; we need to access various resources. What we don’t need is to relegate ourselves to the position of depending on someone else to offer us inclusion and access to those resources. Inclusion is something they must give, but our liberation is something we will take." MVC

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It's pretty thoughtless to state that "all" Americans are in as much danger as Eric Garner (since not all Americans are black and working class), but this is a pretty shocking statistic:

"Husak cites estimates that more than 70 percent of American adults have committed a crime that could lead to imprisonment." Bloomberg

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"Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century." Cabinet

Links, Friday 12th Dec

South African Home Affairs is refusing to renew asylum seekers' temporary papers, exposing them to arbitrary arrest. Some of them have been waiting for permanent papers for more than a decade.

Groundup

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The Cracked "personal experience" stories have generally been very well done, and are actually some of the more insightful bits of journalism I've seen lately. Here is an article talking about the editorial process. Spectator

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This column conflates two issues. On the one hand is the issue of government financing. The present regime of "quantitative easing" involves central banks buying government bonds and other securities. This increases the price of assets and decreases borrowing costs in the short-term, but actually isn't very inflationary in the long-term - everyone knows that the central bank will eventually sell those bonds again. If they really wanted to "print money", they could announce they were buying bonds and *never getting rid of them*. This would essentially create money out of thin air, which the government could do with as it pleased. As it happens, I think printing money, in limited quantities, would probably be a good thing, since much of the rich world is suffering deflation right now.

On the other hand is the question of what a government should do with borrowed (or printed) money: buy corporate bonds, prop up banks, build infrastructure, hand out cheques to people, etc. As it happens, I think handing out cheques would also be rather a good use of money. But where the money comes from and what you do with it are separate issues! Guardian

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Some of this resonates, but I also see how it could be used by the "Social Justice Warriors are censoring me! *boo hoo*" crowd. Thoughts? McGill Daily

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LOL. "The geek hierarchy"

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"Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties.

But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project."

Baffler

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"A local Tumblr account, Suburban Fear, highlights just how common racial profiling is in the community forums and neighbourhood watches of South Africa’s suburban neighbourhoods and how self righteous volunteers proudly speak of “taking back the streets” as they continue to enforce informal apartheid in South Africa 20 years after democracy." Daily Vox

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"Personal injury lawyers have become so familiar with such vehicular niceties that they've coined a term for them: the "wave of death." Cracked