Non-price competition
Non-price competition? Here's another take on it. ...in a free market - and by free here I mean the ideal forms of capitalism propounded in the Wealth of Nations, the lowest cost-provider wins. Now as it turns out this type of capitalism is not what we see in the software industry. And in the long term those with the current monopoly cannot compete with Free Software on price or quality. So the monopolist must resort to other means - it must prevent the market from being free, because a free market means it loses its vast and expanding powers. -- Andreas Pour The interview is here: http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=Newsfile=articlesid=158 (This is not a technical piece, but for those completely unacquainted with Linux, KDE is an (optional) bunch of software that provides a GUI -- buttons, popup menus, dialog boxes etc. -- for computers using the GNU/Linux operating system. Like GNU-ware and Linux, it is freeware.) - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: A creative misunderstanding
Fingerspitzengefuhl [...] But originally I thought the term meant to put some spit on your finger... And you thought Spitzbergen was Spit Mountains? :-) (Where did I get my original misunderstanding from?... Back when people still ironed their clothes, even further back, before steam irons, it was commonplace to lick you finger and blip it against the face of the iron. If there was a steam pop, the iron was hot enough, else it wasn't. As any homemaker or blacksmith can tell you, this avoided the possible insalubrious outcome that you lose a piece of skin when you finger sticks to the hot metal. Or perhaps you spent too much time, in your previous incarnation, gazing at the poster that began Achtung! Alles Lookenpeepers while contemplating a difficult algorithm. ;-) - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: Fw: Brave New World II
...a pattern of events at the Department of Health and Human Services suggesting that scientific decision-making is being subverted by ideology and that scientific information that does not fit the Administration's political agenda is being suppressed... During the Lysenko era, Stalin's scientific establisment suppressed Linus Pauling's resonance theory of organic molecular structure because it employed virtual structures and was thus incompatible with socialist realism. If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Does the answer change if it's a judge that pronounces a tail a leg? If everybody calls a tail a leg? If a web search for tail AND dog reveals only leg references? Brave New World indeed. - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: Digression qry
Hi, I'm from Kenya and I laughed when I saw this post. You mean there's some other kind of marketing? [] So a small number of suppliers connect with heads of government organisations and agencies and are able to do things which sometimes, can only be described as criminal. If I understand you, that's a broader and more general case than the notion about which I was asking. I gather you mean that suppliers can get corrupt collaboration from government heavies in dominating the whole national market for their product. I guess the sort of sell to the person who can coerce others to use it strategy that I was wondering about segues more or less smoothly into graft, kickbacks and other corrupt practices but it was the strategy, not the corruption, that I was asking about. - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Digression qry (Was: Last words (Was: Moral hazard (Was: Or poorer)))
Unemployment, Keynes showed, was due to a deficiency in the demand for goods and services. This is an aside from Keynes. I've noticed a phenomenon for which I don't have a name but which seems to be so widespread that there must be a name for it. Any of the economist or biz wizards know what this is called? You have (or are developing) a product. One or more of the following applies: The competition's product is as good or better. The competition's product is as popular or more so. No one who might use your product wants it. The per-unit transaction costs of marketing your product is high. You could make a lot more money if people would buy inferior versions of your product. So you don't try to sell it to users. You focus all your marketing effort on institutions that can coerce large numbers of end users to use it. Software is the most outstanding example. You promote $BIGNUM copies to a corporation, government or school board who will then coerce employees or students to use it. Most commercial training software I've seen is so braindead that no competent learner would use it but if the lisensing agency for $OCCUPATION can be sold on it, the agency will then coerce trainees to use it. The developers are motivated to go heavy on the bells, whistles and eye candy that will tickle some functionary with a desk job wo makes the decision to buy/use the software. Not limited to software, however. A similar situation exists with the building code. Vendors lobby, strategize and weasel to get their products required. The result is approved, officially and putatively safe but embarassingly flimsy or third rate stuff in every dwelling. So what's the name for this marketing strategy? - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: Rewiring the brain
Keith wrote: the brain is substantially hard-wired (that is, of all the important processes -- as laid down strictly by genes). My avocational neuroscience reading goes in episodes and the last extended one was several years ago so I'm a bit behind. But so far as I understand it, genes don't -- and cannot -- serve as a spec or blueprint for the synaptic connectedness of the brain. In the first place, genes code for proteins, among which are enzymes. So far as I know, the gap between protiens and gross morphology is still a mystery despite being occupied by a huge corpus of biochemical research. To the extent that it may be said at all that genes code for the connections of the brain, it is that they code for a large number of enzymes which in turn catalyse a vast collection -- better, a vast system -- of reactions, gradients, partitions and so on. The connections in the brain eventuate, during the course of ontogeny, from the complexity of these reactions. That leaves a lot of room for neural plasticity. A simpler argument however, points of that there are 10^10 neurons in the brain -- or is the best estimate now 10^11 or 10^12? Each neuron has, on average, 10^3 connections to other neurons. That means somewhere between 10^13 and 10^15 synaptic connections. The DNA in an individual doesn't have the informational capacity to code for that many data items. QED. There's another interesting observation of a similar nature. Rapid, highly controlled manual tasks such as those of highly skilled craftsmen or of playing a musical instrument involve a great many degrees of freedom, i.e. independent variables, that must be controlled for success in the task. The neural pathways from brain to hand are, at least in comparison with those within the brain, few and slow. They do not have the informational bandwith to carry the neccessary control data in real time. Data can pass from the workpiece or instrument to the brain through the relatively fast, high bandwidth acoustic and optic pathways and the brain can process this -- the sound of a note or of a hammer on metal or the visual result of the hammer blow -- with relatively rapidity. But sufficiently detailed neuromotor impulses can't get back to the actuator -- the hand -- fast enough or in sufficent numbers to do the job of controlling the observable degrees of freedon in thge hand. How then, can we explain the observed facts of musicians, craftsmen etc.? The inference to be made is that the process of practice and learning must involve neural changes in the spinal ganglia such that -- speaking metaphorically -- rather general instructions from the brain are amplified into detail by the spinal neurons which have been modified through practice to do what the boss -- the brain -- will approve of. If the spinal neurons can be modified to compute a few terms of a Fourier series they can handle the task despite the bandwidth and speed limitations on getting rapid updates to them from the brain. Sorry for the lack of references. One is a paper by a Russian whose name escapes me. Maybe this winter, after I've finished getting my new studio set up, I'll get back to the neuroscience stuff. - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: To survive or not to survive.
Ray said, But whatever happens, it would be wonderful if our economists and futurists on this list would come up with some ideas that could interest the rest of us beyond the tattered 19th century Industrial models. Maybe we could get a Science Fiction writer but with the exception of the Pollinators of Eden and a couple of Roger Zelazny's novels, everything else including my beloved Frank Herbert and Harlan Ellison are inferior to Orwell and Huxley. Where is this Future of Work folks? Well, there *are* some people writing speculative fiction -- one even calls his work science fiction -- that suggest the future of work. Here's a short list: Bruce Sterling, _Distraction_ Bruce Sterling, _Holy Fire_ Bruce Sterling, _Heavy Weather_ William Gibson, _Virtual Light_ William Gibson, _Idoru_ William Gibson, _All Tomorrow's Parties_ Neal Stephenson, _The Diamond Age_ Bruce Sterling, Maneki Neko (short story in _A Good Old-fashioned Future_) Bruce Sterling, Bicycle Repairman (short story in _A GoodOld-fashioned Future_) - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: We have made income the enemy of wealth, long version.
Ray wrote: ...I don't see why simple widgit jobs should be so important while jobs that involve the whole person are often forced to be done for free. Because jobs describes a convetion for commoditizing human endeavor, reducing some fragment of it to predictability and then purchasing it for as little as the vendor will take. Typically. people who buy this commodity aren't interested in buying whole persons, only in buying a market commidity. Whole persons aren't a predictable commodity. And whole persons get all f***ed up trying to carry on human endeavor *as* whole persons and simultaneously trying to commoditize themselves for a job or trying to merchandise their endeavors. - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: MD urges screening CEOs for psychopaths
[Time to bring the corporations off their psycho paths !] [snip] Evil lurks at the top? MD urges screening CEOs for psychopaths In popular vernacular, psychopath is associated with violent, kinky sex, serial and mass murder, cannibalism and other extremes of spectacular, slasher flick behavior. This is, so far as I have figured out, a mistaken association. The nutters who do such nasty stuff are a subset of psychopaths with other psychological deviances as well. And some may not even be psychopaths. The DSM IV says that psychopath is a synonym for sociopath and for the preferred diagnostic term, anti-social personality disorder. There are several other similar and related personality disorders recognized by the DSM, including narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder that are differentiated, in the diagnostic setting, by rather subtle distinctions. None of these related disorders *neccessarily* involve sexual violence or perversion or other violent or horrific behavior. I've found it interesting to note that the persona of the corporation, established by an accumulation juridicial fiat and by a century or two of practice, is a close match for the DSM's charaterization of a psychopath. It seems quite reasonable to me that, in a corporate context, corporate values and one or another corporate culture work to select personalities that are consonant with the underlying psychopathic character of the corporate persona. This sort of selection is obvious at the superficial level. That success in the executive millieu represents a strong selective process for the anti-social or narcissistic personality is less obvious but is a very reasonable hypothesis. The very traits that mark the psychopath or narcissist are valued in the executive and managerial context. - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: The Dirty Secret about TV Content
Amy If we are offered the choice of ad-free TV by paying for content, Amy the truth will come out dennis If offered the option of paying for ad-free TV, how would your dennis viewing habits change? Heh. Not at all. I simply can't imagine paying the price of a good book or a pair of ViseGrips(tm) every month or two for TV. My TV got broken in the late 70s. Declared finally dead in the 80s. Went out for trash collection, covered with attic dust in the late 90s. Good riddance. - Mike
Re: FW Another test
At : Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 10:26:24 +0100 Sally wrote: We seem to be having some on and off list functioning. Please reply if this test comes through to you. Sally Received that. Also Ed Weick's Is the list still there? qry of Mon, 29 Apr 2002 19:10:47 -0400 and the Monthly reminder of Wed, 1 May 2002 12:39:46 +0100. - Mike
Re: FW Nomadic workers
Between the death of Samuel Yellin and the beginning of the revival in the early 70s, art blacksmithing languished in North America, kept alive mostly by a few of the people who had worked with Yellin. It was chiefly in Germany that the craft continued to flourish and to enjoy wide appreciation. Although contemporary Kunstschmiede -- artist blacksmiths -- may attend Hochschule, apprenticeship has remained the normal entry to the craft. Having finished his Lehrzeit, the journeyman -- Wandergeselle -- regarded traveling from shop to shop as an important, even necessary component of his training. By working in, or at least briefly visiting, many shops the young smith became acquainted with techniques and tooling, styles and design approaches in much wider variety that would be available at the one shop where he apprenticed. A curious part of this tradition was this: The wandering smith had no regular income and depended on the work, short or long term, that he was offered at the shops he visited. If there was no paid work available, he was still welcomed, fed and put up for a night or two. In token payment for this hospitality, he was hired to make a nail which was then driven into the stump that supported the anvil. Although I haven't seen it myself, it's reported that there are old shops in Germany, some of them very old, that have anvil stumps solidly armor plated with many hundreds of plain and ornamental nail-heads made by many generations of journeyman smiths. (I've used the male pronoun above. The president of the Artist Blacksmiths' Association of North America was for years a woman smith and I believe that the present president of a similar organization in Germany is a woman, but acceptance of women in the craft is, with a few exceptions, a relatively recent innovation. Nailmaking, probably the most tedious drudgery in the blacksmithing domain, was often done by women in England a couple of hundred years ago, presumably because the stronger of them were regarded as equal to repetitive drudgery if not to more intellectually demanding tasks such as making horseshoes and wagon tires, let alone ornamental ironwork.) - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: RANT Three basic realms
Steve wrote: Harry, I'll not take your rotten bait. (it's been the same for years, hence too mouldy to entertain) [snip] Go ahead and expound, Harry. Nobody cares. And I'll not reply again to your introspections on these matters. I wish that there was mandatory voting by listmembers to put pompous certitude in its place. Down the digital hall and around the corner in Usenet newsgroups, Harry's self-confessed bear-baiting is called trolling. With a rather less refined standard of discourse than that which we try to maintain on FutureWork, Usenet trolls are sometimes successful in their efforts to provoke pointless controversy and richly scatological flamage or, alternatively, are simply plonked -- filtered out by individual readers' software -- or are greeted with The Sign: .:\:/:. +---+ .:\:\:/:/:. | PLEASE DO NOT |:.:\:\:/:/:.: | FEED THE TROLLS | :=.' - - '.=: | | '=(\ 9 9 /)=' | Thank you, | ( (_) ) | Management | /`-vvv-'\ +---+ / \ | |@@@ / /|,|\ \ | |@@@ /_// /^\ \\_\ @x@@x@| | |/ WW( ( ) )WW \/| |\| __\,,\ /,,/__ \||/ | | | jgs (__Y__) /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\//\/\\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ == (which will make no sense to you if you use a variable width font to read your mail; Try switching to a fixed width font.) - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: FW: FCC to Auction Definite, Indefinite Articles
FCC to Auction Definite, Indefinite Articles How nice. This will put the(tm) notion that the(tm) Market is a(tm) fundamental principle of the(tm) universe to the(tm) test. - Mike
FWk: Re: Double-stranded Economics
Harry quoted me: me It is, I think, even worse to start with ad hoc generalizations of the me emergent properties of the aggregate and then employ them as me hypotheses from which, with the application of scientific reasoning, me we hope to deduce a science of the good society. And opined: hp Maybe you don't know what ad hoc means. C'mon Harry. Lay off the condescension. To this, to the purpose at hand. In this case, to the purpose of creating suitable slogans for an ideology. hp I am also not sure how emergent properties of the aggregate applies hp to an Assumption about individual action. Your Assumptions are not about individual action. They are about Man in the 19th century sense of generalizing to all of man- or human-kind, as I think you were at pains to explain in an earlier post. Many of the things we may say about Mankind allude to emergent properties of complex interactions between multitudinous individuals, no one of which alone *neccessarily* exhibits the properties to which we allude. me Harry has, IIRC, repeated several times his premises: hp I don't know what IIRC ... If I recall correctly. me I don't see this as any less a religious dogma than All have sinned me and come short of the glory of God. ' hp You mean the two Assumptions are wrong. Well, you are a scientist. hp Show it. All you need is one exception. that shouldn't be hard to find. hp zhp A religious dogma is something that is proclaimed as true without proof. hp hp So, disprove it. Show everyone on Future Works that the two hp Assumptions are not true of human behavior. No, I didn't *mean* they are wrong, although I think they're bogus -- generalities of the same quality as Everybody loves a parade or There's nothing like a good cigar and constructed or chosen for their propaganda value (ad hoc). I *meant* that they were offered as zdogma and seemed to me to qualify as such. No, I'm not a scientist, although I've studied a bit of science and make some effort to continue in that avocation. No, a religious dogma, at least as I construe the word, is proclaimed authoritatively as subject neither to proof nor disproof. It is the nature of good propaganda technique to construct slogans that repel and evade critique. A subsequent invitation to disprove the slogan is part of the propaganda. Prove to me that there *is* somthing like a good cigar! hp Then start thinking again about your statement that: Hard science hp is essentially statistical in nature. Um, well, I've been thinking about it for close to 40 years, off an on. I regret that my insights haven't been more brilliant. hp You should understand that there are two kinds of knowledge. The hp knowledge of truths and the knowledge of things. I don't think there are *any* absolute truths except tautologies and the mathematical truths derived from explicit axioms which are themselves essentially tautological. Of the non-absolute truths, I'm inclined to think there are far more than two varieties, the very notion of a non-absolute truth being as ambiguous as it is. But lets move on... hp The two Assumptions are truths. Now that sounds pretty much like an authoritative proclamation, subject neither to proof nor disproof. If they are truths, was it not ingenuous of you to have invited me to disprove them? In his recent book, _On Equilibrium_, John Ralston Saul refers to: ...the fear we all carry within us. It is there. If we give in to it, we begin seeking not specific forces, but an all-encompassing truth. An so we choose a single quality as our godhead, and then gather all the rest of our existence beneath its umbrella. This is ideology. (p. 13) hp These Assumptions apply to every person... Another authoritative proclamation, the partial truth of which depends on the ambiguity of desire and the domain within which unlimited is to apply. Ray made that pretty clear in his post on Friday, q.v. hp The rest of what you wrote was interesting, but had nothing to do with hp our subject. I hope that at least a few FW readers found it interesting. And I guess it may have had too little to do with our subject. But I'm reasonably sure that it had far too little to do with *your* subject, too little to do with the propagation of the faith. - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Erratum FWk: Re: Double-stranded Economics
Sorry to follow up to my own post. I made a typo that makes a sentence confusing: For: I don't see this as any less a religious dogma that All have sinned... read I don't see this as any less a religious dogma than All have sinned... - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: Fw: conference
Gail wrote: gail There is, however, so much confusion in this conference between gail work and employment... And Harry replied: Gail, The reason for all production is wages. Sometimes, people seem to forget it. And you sneer at at Pete for mentioning a functioning economic model? That assertion is an economic model all by itself. I haven't had any wages for -- lessee, maybe 25 years. No salary and I'm not independently wealthy. Perhaps lots of folks would say I'm a slacker for taking on neither the work ethic in the form of waged employment nor the obligations of a good consumer but I've produced lots of stuff, both physical and intangiblez, in that time. For a few of your posts there I began to think you were down a pint but now you're even capitalizing the word Assumption when you refer again and again to your ex cathedra doctrine of the infinitely lazy infinite acquisitor: ...come up with a couple of exceptions to the Assumptions. There are, just approximately, an infinite number of observations of human behavior that are sufficiently valid to form the basis of discussion and I'll grant that status to your two Assumptions (sic) but not, by a very long shot, that of laws of human behavior. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Ameican Psychiatric Association is full of sets of usefully valid observations of human behavior. Here's an exercise: For each of the entries in the DSM under Personality disorders, assess whether or not persons meeting the relevant diagnostic criteria would enthusiastically embrace your two Assumptions or not. We'll have a meaningful, scientific grasp of human behavior when we establish reproducible correlates between neural activity and organization and consciousness -- a detailed explication of what is often called the mind-body problem. It will not come soon. Marvin Minsky has been quoted as having advised a student interested in the subject to forego it on the grounds that the real discoveries were sufficiently far in the future that the student's career could not possibly be a stellar one. In my only slightly humble opinion, many of our contemporary great minds have shingled off into the fog on this. Others, such as neurologist Gerald Edelman and mathematician Stuart Kauffman have developed intrigueing insights, albeit ones that also indicate how far we are from a deep understanding of the matter. While I find the mind-body problem (There is no problem: minds are what brains do. -- Minsky) one of the most practicaly challenging and theoretically interesting questions extant, I don't think I want to live in a world where we understand it well enough to make from it an applied science in the hands of those powerful enough to pay for the RD. That sounds to me like technology of the ultimate totalitarian fiefdom. It is marginally better today, to the extent that the powerful manipulators base their efforts on bogus formulations that humans everywhere are able to prove false again and again. We get our clothes from the tailor - or from Penny's or Marks and Sparks We get our meat from the butcher and our produce from the greengrocer. We get our milk from the milkman. Isn't this more sensible than keeping two cows - one to slaughter - growing 17 different vegetable, running up tee-shirts on the sewing machine, and spending a couple of weeks producing an ill-fitting suit? Only if you don't know how to grow a tomato or have an earthworm phobia; if you think trace hormonal contamination of milk is a non-issue or you haven't the skills to to make things you need that suit you better than the rubbish most vendors offer. Or if -- well, there are *lots* of other ifs. Jeez, Harry, it's more complicated than that. *Everything* is more complicated than that, for most values of that. What I said was that we don't try to analyze the single complicated human ... Now that's a problem, isn't it? To make the kind of generalizatons you do, you have to treat people as simplified economic units and construct a model in which they're the components. We can see what a person does. As an economic scientist, or as a lay person, I can see how someone behaves. If all the persons whose behavior you have an opportunity to observe behave in accordance with your two Assumptions, you need a better class of friends and you need to get out more. - Mike
Re: community and money
Ed Weick said: I have no problem with the state being in the welfare business, the education business, the health business, etc., etc. In fact, I believe these things are its business, and should be paid for by a fair, progressive tax system. What he said. I personally deplore the current ideologically based campaign to weaken, erode and destroy many of the good services that the modern state has come to operate over the past two centuries. So do I. It's almost as though educating children has been placed in the same category as selling junk at Walmart. Just so. You might find this interesting: http://eserver.org/clogic/4-1/levidow.html Prospective students are represented as customers/markets in order to justify commodifying [1] educational services. Knowledge becomes a product for individual students to consume, rather than a collaborative process for students and teachers. Individualized learning both promotes and naturalizes life-long re-skilling for a flexibilized, fragmented, insecure labour market. By standardizing course materials, moreover, administrators can reduce teachers to software-writers or even replace them with subcontractors. Through ICT, neoliberal agendas take the apparently neutral form of greater access and flexible delivery. In all these ways, student-teacher relations are reified as relations between things, e.g. between consumers and providers of software. The author (Les Levidow) is writing about postsecondary education but the people whose university education is situated in a context of commoditized edu-product will be the next generation of teachers, curriculum developers and school adminitrators for earlier education. And the management superstructure, embodying an ex-cathedra philosophy which has (as far as I can tell) emanated from Columbia Teacher's College over the last 50 years, is already in place almost everywhere. - Mike --- [1] OT, cranky whine: I detest the construct commodification. It should be commoditization. [2] [2] It has been said that footnotes in email are pretentious. :-) --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: FWk: Corporate global citizen
Pete Vincent drifted through the magazine rack at a local retailer a couple of days ago and observed: ...a company called ABB, with which I am wholly unfamiliar. Asea Brown Boveri http://www.sverigeturism.se/smorgasbord/smorgasbord/industry/com/abb.html http://www.abb.com/(a nightmare of javascript) Wanna build a US$300,000,000 power transmission grid? Automate your global net of chemical plants? Build an integrated pulp, paper and pharmaceuticals plant? Build a national waterworks? You found the right place. :-) When they decide to pipe Lake Winnepeg to Los Angeles, these are the guys that will be bidding on the work. ...the company is a global corporation with billions of bucks and thousands of employees... Just opened up a branch in North Korea this month. It proclaimed this corporation a signatory to a UN resolution on global corporate citizenship... Is this the deal in which corporations partner with the UN in order to guide the humble UN bureaucrats on the path of global righteousness? ... approximate quote (from memory): Putting bottom line profits ahead of the welfare of society is not just cynical, it is dangerous. Um, well, the corporate home page doesn't mention that. They do claim to have had a hand in cleaning up Boston Harbour. That's somthing, for sure. - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
[FW] Re: Toilets!
About grim restrooms in the workplace, Arthur Cordell wrote: ac There is an MA or Ph.d thesis here on the ergonomics and intellectual ac ecology of the total workplace. and Gail Stewart asked: gs Have we so thoroughly abdicated our responsibility to develop gs good policy advice that, in a human world of many languages, we gs will only listen to those who speak science? [] gs Have we installed a discourse of the deliberately selectively gs deaf between ourselves as citizens and our elected gs representatives? How might we have got ourselves into such a gs situation? Consider theat ubiquitous tool of policy implementation: the form -- credit application, job application, tax report, work order, whatever. A form isn't so much a means of *transmitting* information as it is one of *selectively limiting* the information transmitted in a given transaction. True, some computerized forms won't process a transaction until every field is filled -- my local Canadian Tire's computer won't process returned brakeshoes without a phone number but is happy if I give it the store's number which is conspicuously posted nearby. More important is that there is no way whatever to inject into that transaction any special problem or circumstances, personal opinion or complaint that I might have. The "discourse" is stringently limited to what it has been calculated to be in the interests of the store to process. Similarly selective forms implement government policies as well as commercial ones. Admittedly, that's implementation but doesn't the same problem arise at the policy-making level that gives rise to the procrustean form at the user interface? The policy maker is confronted with demands from competing interests and with contradictory assertions of one thing or another from very heterogeneous sources. Whatever the policy established, it is sure to be challenged by those who oppose it and especially by those with evidence that they've been disadvantaged by it. The *language* of science lends the aura of papal imprimitur when it's time to butress a policy, rebut a critique or CYA after a disastrous outcome. The current issue of SciAm has a piece on the "precautionary principle". It makes it fairly clear that the language of science is entrained in the PR campaign for technologies, the widespread introduction of which may have globally disastrous sequellae. Caution exercised in the introduction of a technology with an unknown, possibly unknowable, probability of creating stupendous calamity is "not scientific". So far as I know, the majority of policy makers don't know much science. (I've been shocked to discover that many people with degrees in a science don't know much science.) But they can employ "the language of science" in a footnoted document. gs ...in a credible vocabulary for modern society -- the gs vocabulary of sciencegive credibility to notions long held gs as common sense." (Clyde Hertzman, "The Case for an Early gs Childhood Development Strategy" I don't know anything about "childhood development strategy" but we've all seen the stuff about workplace ergonomics. Real science has been applied to ergonomic keyboards and chairs. The "language of science" speciously justifies everything else -- cubicles, nasty lighting, hotdesking, surveillance etc. But Dilbert gets a better handle on the modern workplace with hyperbole and anecdote. Personally, I'm real keen on science but I think you have to double track your science back and forth with anecdote, intuition and story across CP Snow's great divide. [How'm I doing on my 40 points, Gail? :-) Ray Harrell wrote: reh It is an old Cherokee saying that the only control you have reh over your future is what you choose to surround yourself with. Indeed. And those things have their stories, those things are the tools made or selected just to suit you. As a teenager I worked in a warehouse, packing cheap plastic boots for shipment. No computers, no fancy equipment, just a huge barn of a place stacked to the ceiling with big cardboard cartons of boots. And hand tools: brown paper tape dispensers, Exacto knives, stencils and some guys who were (excepting the boss) mostly school dropouts. But every one of those guys built his own workstation one of the cheap rolling worktables provided. Built an "office" out of cardboard and brown tape -- the only supplies available -- to hold stencils, pencils and crayons, brushes, inkpots, tape dispensers, staples, shipping forms, purchase orders and all the tools and sundries. Every one was different and designed to suit the workstyle and whim of the guy who used it. If your last or only experience with hand tools was a 7th grade shop course, you may never have had an opportunity to notice how a craftsman personalizes his workspace. As a blacksmith, I've gradually embodied a great number of ideosyncracies in my shop and tools -- too many to even recall off
Correction, Re SPAM
Chris ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) pointed out in a private message that I made the same typo twice in one post: I wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Should read: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The good news is that I also had a prompt reply from the person who reads email at the majordomo-owner address to the effect that he has in fact made changes to help protect against spam, and that he would be alert for further problems of that sort. The lack of response to my query to that address occured last September. The present majordomo-owner admin took over in May and the obvious dissatisfaction expressed in my previous post shouldn't reflect on him. No back to our regularly scheduled programming... :-) -Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: Spam Attack
A year or so ago, after the run of spam from Turkey, I emailed Sally suggesting that she arrange to have the FutureWork list reconfigured so that only subscribers could post to it. I'm pretty sure that she replied that the tech people had assured her that there was no way to do that. Then I emailed [EMAIL PROTECTED] about it and had no reply. Given the current state of the net, all mail lists should be configured so that: Only mail from validly subscribed addresses is posted to the list. A subscription request is answered with a confirmation message sent to the subscribing address and a confirmation originating from that address is required before the new address is subscribed to the list. FutureWork does not appear to be so configured. The software exists to do this although I'm not familiar with the details of majordomo, the software that runs FutureWork. FutureWork is completely unprotected from a flood of spam until such measures are implemented. In addition, it is a good idea, albeit the subject of some controversy, to filter all mail to the list through somthing like the MAPS RBL list of known spammer and open relay addresses. Some of this recent spam was relayed through an open server in China. Regretably, as a subscriber I have no authority to pursue this with the list admin(s) at U. Waterloo and it appears that they have been unresponsive to Sally's inquiries about spam protection. The last time I checked, the admin *had* disabled the "review" command on the list server so that a spammer can no longer subscribe, dump the list of subscribed addresses into his database and unsubscribe. Since the solution to this problem is at least partly technical, mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] might be constructive. - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
Re: A new proactive job classification...
I sent an off-list message to Tom Walker about his new occupational description and in his reply hew wrote: If you suspect the lurking masses on futurework (futurelurk?) might find the above edifying, amusing or persuasive please feel free to forward the message. I have already found it edifying and amusing because I've had a brief look around for enlightenment on the notion of "flaneur" and found: There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flanneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. It was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flaneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. (http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~ov/gpeaker/Flaneur.html) So I'm passing it on to futurelurkers. - Mike --- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ --- --- An exchange with the "Sandwichman and Deconsultant" --- On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Mike Spencer wrote: Yo! I have to say I'm much taken with your new professional designation. Indeed, I surmise that a plain "deconsultant" might be handicapped to the point of nonfunctionality without the levity of sandwichmanhood. Yo ho ho, indeed! Did you mean to say levity or leaven? Yes, without the sandwich, deconsulting would be purely contemplative. There is a story -- several stories to be exact -- behind (or within) the sandwichman motif. There is a novel from the 1930s by Walter Brierley in which the protagonist, an unemployed coalminer who had done some university courses, takes work first as a sandwichman (oh the humiliation!) and then as a short-term lecturer in a university extension course (oh the exhileration!). The narration makes clear that the precariousness of the two jobs exhibits a much deeper link than any superficial difference in pay or social prestige. There is also an article by Susan Buck-Morss (I studied with her at Cornell in '87) called "The flaneur, the sandwichman and the whore" in a 1986 New German Critique. The article discusses Walter Benjamin's selection of those three "social types" to exemplify the subjective experience of what might be called service sector labour (my gloss, not Susan's). In Benjamin's notes and essays, the 19th century flaneur serves as the prototype of the modern "man of letters" who comes to the marketplace ostensibly to observe but really to find a buyer. For this literati-for- hire the distinctions between information, entertainment and advertising are blurred. Benjamin described the indigent sandwichman of the 1930s depression as "the last incarnation of the flaneur." In continuing my research on sandwichmanhood/sandwichwomanhood I was delighted to discover another connection. It turns out that "sandwiching" was the principal means that the women's suffragists in London at the turn of the (last) century used to promote and sell their magazines (and hence their cause). Both the movement and the tactic dovetail with the circle of literary modernists, collected around the English Review circa 1908. In her account of her life during those years, Violet Hunt, relates two incidents with sandwichboards. The first was an occasion on which she went out in the street with a friend "to beg" in support of votes for women. "I fancy whe felt as I did -- as if we had suddenly been stripped naked, with a cross-sensation of being drowned in a tank and gasping for breath." The second was an encounter with a sandwichboard headlining a "sex scandal" featuring herself and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), the editor of the ER. There are two images of sandwichmen in the Buck-Morss article. One is of a tall, gaunt but uniformed and sandwiched fellow leafleting on a Paris street. The other is of a Jewish man being escorted by armed Nazi guards and wearing the sign, "I am a Jew but I have no complaints about the Nazis." One final image of the sandwichman is a photomontage by John Heartfield from 1932 (a year before the above-mentioned parade). A photo of a man wearing a sign proclaiming "Nehme jede ARBEIT an" is superimposed standing on the train of an expensive wedding gown over the caption, "The finest products of capitalism". Heartfield's juxtaposition of the gown was, of course, superfluous. It would be interesting to hear about your experiences as a sandwichman. I would suppose that the default expectation upon seeing a sandwichman in the street would be that he's selling somthing, prob
