[silk] Debt: The first 5000 years
Fascinating. I need to re-read _The Ascent of Money_ now. Udhay http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/22/debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/ Anthropologist David Graeber recently sent in his essay on the 5000 year history of debt (orignally published in Mute and Eurozine). Aside from being an interesting read in general, this effort (which he is just now finishing as a book) is an interesting resource for the Eternal Coin and the Long Finance project. Debt: The first five thousand years by David Graeber Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors. What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call “the economy”. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence – maintained by the contemporary state. Let me start with the institution of slavery, whose role, I think, is key. In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life; your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him; a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable. He can in principle extract anything he wants, and all debts – obligations – you may owe to others (your friends, family, former political allegiances), or that others owe you, are seen as being absolutely negated. Your debt to your owner is all that now exists. This sort of logic has at least two very interesting consequences, though they might be said to pull in rather contrary directions. First of all, as we all know, it is another typical – perhaps defining – feature of slavery that slaves can be bought or sold. In this case, absolute debt becomes (in another context, that of the market) no longer absolute. In fact, it can be precisely quantified. There is good reason to believe that it was just this operation that made it possible to create something like our contemporary form of money to begin with, since what anthropologists used to refer to as “primitive money”, the kind that one finds in stateless societies (Solomon Island feather money, Iroquois wampum), was mostly used to arrange marriages, resolve blood feuds, and fiddle with other sorts of relations between people, rather than to buy and sell commodities. For instance, if slavery is debt, then debt can lead to slavery. A Babylonian peasant might have paid a handy sum in silver to his wife’s parents to officialise the marriage, but he in no sense owned her. He certainly couldn’t buy or sell the mother of his children. But all that would change if he took out a loan. Were he to default, his creditors could first remove his sheep and furniture, then his house, fields and orchards, and finally take his wife, children, and even himself as debt peons until the matter was settled (which, as his resources vanished, of course became increasingly difficult to do). Debt was the hinge that made it possible to imagine money in anything like the modern sense, and therefore, also, to produce what we like to call the market: an arena where anything can be bought and sold, because all objects are (like slaves) disembedded from their former social relations and exist only in relation to money. But at the same time the logic of debt as conquest can, as I mentioned, pull another way. Kings, throughout history, tend to be profoundly ambivalent towards allowing the logic of debt to get completely out of hand. This is not because they are hostile to markets. On the contrary, they normally encourage them, for the simple reason that governments find it inconvenient to levy everything they need (silks, chariot wheels, flamingo tongues, lapis lazuli) directly from their subject population; it’s much easier to encourage markets and then buy them. Early markets often followed armies or royal entourages, or formed near palaces or at the fringes of military posts. This actually helps
Re: [silk] Silk Meet?
Count me in too. Might be slightly late as I have a call to attend in the evening. Cheers, Venky (the Second). On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 9:34 AM, savita rao savita.s@gmail.com wrote: Friday works for me, can't make it on Saturday. Savita On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 12:08 AM, Madhu Menon c...@shiokfood.com wrote: On 03-05-2010 18:18, Udhay Shankar N wrote: Works for me. What about the others? I may not be able to make it either on Saturday. -- Madhu Menon http://twitter.com/madmanweb -- One hundred thousand lemmings can't be wrong.
Re: [silk] Abu Bangalore?
On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Thaths tha...@gmail.com wrote: And now the Supreme Court of India says narco analysis is unwarranted intrusion of personal liberty: Why does the SC always have to be the adult in the room? I find this a disturbing phenomenon not just in Indian government but it's also been my experience when dealing with private individuals and companies in India - there's a strong tendency to try to do things in half measures until otherwise corrected. What is it about the India that makes this happen?
[silk] Moore's Law: Pining for the Fjords?
http://arst.ch/jo6 Moore's Law is not dead. It's merely pining for the fjords By Jon Stokes | Last updated May 5, 2010 11:04 AM What if I took to the pages of a major business magazine and made the bold recommendation that, because humans have run out of new places on Earth that we can migrate to, it is past time for us to make the collective leap to faster-than-light travel so that we can explore neighboring solar systems? Your reaction would probably be something like, Yes, of course everyone would love to go faster than light, and if it were as easy as just deciding we all want to do it then it would be done already. That's pretty much how I felt after reading a recent [Forbes op-ed][1] by NVIDIA's Bill Dally, in which he declares, It is past time for the computing industry—and everyone who relies on it for continued improvements in productivity, economic growth and social progress—to take the leap into parallel processing. Obviously yes, we would all love to just magically jump right into parallel processing, and transform all of our existing serial workloads into parallel workloads. But there are two big problems: 1) nobody knows the percentage of existing serial workloads that can be usefully parallelized (but it's probably small), and 2) parallel programming is *hard*. [1]: http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/29/moores-law-computing-processing-opinions-contributors-bill-dally.html ### A lot of serial, not as much parallel Note that in the preceding paragraph, I spoke of workloads and not programs. That's because the problem isn't that existing software has been written one way and it needs to be rewritten in some new way. It's that the tasks that the software carries out are inherently serial. Of course, Dally is well aware of this distinction, but he conveniently ignores it because it doesn't help his point. However, the example that Dally uses to illustrate the difference between serial and parallel is actually a very good illustration of the fact that we can't just rewrite serial software and make it parallel. Here's Dally's analogy: Reading this essay is a serial process—you read one word after another. But counting the number of words, for example, is a problem best solved using parallelism. Give each paragraph to a different person, and the work gets done far more quickly. Yep, the process of reading is definitely serial—there's *no way* to accomplish the task in parallel (believe me, I've tried), and no amount of programming wizardry will make it otherwise. Word counts, on the other hand, can be done either in serial or in parallel; but counting words is a much less interesting and useful undertaking than reading. As with reading vs. word counts, it has so far turned out that the main bulk of ordinary computing tasks that are interesting and worthwhile are serial tasks; the parallel stuff, while critically important in a few key verticals, is niche. This is unfortunate for NVIDIA, because NVIDIA is in the parallel business. Now, it could ultimately happen that the set of interesting things that we want to do with computers that are best done in parallel will one day grow larger than the set of interesting things that we want to do with computers that can only be done serially, and if that happens that will be great for everyone (not just NVIDIA); but so far we appear to be on track for the opposite outcome. Ultimately, NVIDIA's fundamental problem boils down to this simple fact: you can do parallel tasks in a serial manner, but you can't do serial tasks in a parallel manner. What this means for computing's history up until now is that everyone started out making serial hardware, with the result that parallel tasks have tended to be done in serial because that's the hardware that was available. Some percentage of those tasks can be rethought to work in parallel, but, as I said above, so far this percentage has been disappointingly low. ### Are our programmers learning? Dally talks a bit about practices and approaches, as if writing parallel software is mainly a matter of tools and training. Would that it were so. There are some folks who honestly believe that if we gave computer science students the right tools for explicitly expressing parallelism and we totally reformed the comp sci curriculum so that students are trained to use these tools from day one, we'd enter into some sort of golden age of parallelism. But the number of people who think this way is shrinking, at least from what I've informally observed. This issue came up in an untranscribed portion of the [conversation][2] that I had with Stanford president and RISC pioneer John Hennessy, and it has come up in many other conversations that I've had since with folks in the field: most humans just don't seem to be wired to be able to learn to do parallel programming at the level that our processor hardware now demands. It's not that it can't be done—a few people can really take to it and do it well. But, like the innate
Re: [silk] Abu Bangalore?
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.com wrote: Why does the SC always have to be the adult in the room? I find this a disturbing phenomenon not just in Indian government but it's also been my experience when dealing with private individuals and companies in India - there's a strong tendency to try to do things in half measures until otherwise corrected. What is it about the India that makes this happen? Because the motives for doing a thing are never what they seem. I have rarely seen anyhing done for its own sake. it is typically done with oblique motives. Sometimes they are done for effect, ie., to show that something is being done. The purity of the reasons that would guide the action are never front and center. And all of this happens because that is the way money moves in this country. The SC in fact is sick and tired of constantly being, as you put it, the adult in the room. They get panned from time to time for judicial activism. But if they don't do it then you'd never find out about, for e.g., the mining activites of the Reddy brothers or how long the Delhi giovt dithered over introducing CNG or how many lions there are in Gir or how many tigers we have. Also, withuot the SC taking the steps ittakes information/data from the private sector would rarely enter the public domain and we'd be stuck with data garnered/contorted by the executive. At the core, I think, is that our political class is never made to pay for their many faults.
Re: [silk] For the carnatic music lovers on Silk
There are notebooks, somewhere around (with one of my uncles or aunts I guess). Lots of songs annotated by my grand-uncle Deepa Mohan [06/05/10 18:05 +0530]: Wowa very big thank you. I belong to the Dikshitar shishya parampara and this was a treasure for me. I recently documented my Guru singing Chandram bhaja...but have not got around to the rest. Deepa. On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.netwrote: http://rapidshare.com/files/384039475/kallidaikurichi_ramalinga_bhagavatar_dikshitar_kritis_-_old_rare_private_recording.mp3
Re: [silk] Silk Meet?
Hey Udhay Till what time are yu going to hang out?also send me yr mobile number 'Naresh' Narasimhan Sent from my Phone On 06-May-2010, at 11:50, Venky TV venky...@gmail.com wrote: Count me in too. Might be slightly late as I have a call to attend in the evening. Cheers, Venky (the Second). On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 9:34 AM, savita rao savita.s@gmail.com wrote: Friday works for me, can't make it on Saturday. Savita On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 12:08 AM, Madhu Menon c...@shiokfood.com wrote: On 03-05-2010 18:18, Udhay Shankar N wrote: Works for me. What about the others? I may not be able to make it either on Saturday. -- Madhu Menon http://twitter.com/madmanweb -- One hundred thousand lemmings can't be wrong.
Re: [silk] For the carnatic music lovers on Silk
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 06 May 2010 10:54 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: Enjoy .. you will find that the songs are in the true dikshitar bani (down to the re re phrasing at the end of chandram bhaja manasa, as described in http://www.guruguha.org/kmb.php) Thanks ever so much! Will be downloading and listening to it this weekend. I *must* grab lots more carnatic music from you when I'm down in Madras. Cheers, Pranesh -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkvjEiYACgkQ7JoSBR1cXwckSgCcC1UNh7UFmj0+veRLc+x+0Gxe os8Ani0HY7i/H9Qnk8JO2GR0jxbWlPmw =Ocs4 -END PGP SIGNATURE-
[silk] PGP/MIME or inline PGP?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Dear Silklisters, What do you folks generally prefer: PGP/MIME or inline PGP? My observations are that usage of PGP/MIME makes it more difficult to locate messages with attachments in clients that don't grok it (or most webmail), inline PGP, otoh, becomes a distraction for everybody. I've had many a fail sending PGP/MIME mails to folks who still use Outlook Express. Also, PGP/MIME can sometimes get screwed up badly-configured mailing lists (which, for that matter, can even fail to respect inline PGP at times). Is there a general rule of thumb that you've set for yourself as to when you use one or the other? I'm currently experimenting with inline PGP with my Gmail account, instead of PGP/MIME. My pubkey, for those interested: http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0xEC9A12051D5C5F07 Cheers, Pranesh -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkvjFjQACgkQ7JoSBR1cXwdA4wCeKFkkHOQK9Uo2Tie3rnS8xoJT lAsAn2gF09xsyg7HExM4tAnVbb1pYMK9 =oAG0 -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [silk] For the carnatic music lovers on Silk
Pranesh Prakash [07/05/10 00:31 +0530]: Thanks ever so much! Will be downloading and listening to it this weekend. I *must* grab lots more carnatic music from you when I'm down in Madras. Any time. There's like 3..4 GB worth of carnatic you're welcome to.
Re: [silk] PGP/MIME or inline PGP?
Pranesh Prakash [07/05/10 00:49 +0530]: Is there a general rule of thumb that you've set for yourself as to when you use one or the other? I'm currently experimenting with inline PGP with my Gmail account, instead of PGP/MIME. I dont use pgp for everything under the sun. Where I do use it (in some clear, well defined use cases, mostly work related) I send pgp encrypted mail, inline rather than pgp-mime. Far less breakage possible that way. I hardly ever sign my email .. what's not worth encrypting is almost always not worth signing either.
Re: [silk] Silk Meet?
Xxxrum wrote, [on 5/6/2010 11:26 PM]: Hey Udhay Till what time are yu going to hang out?also send me yr mobile number I will ask for a table for 7-8 people at Silver Wok [1] at around 7:30pm. We should be there a while. Anyone who needs directions can call the restaurant, or me at 98450 74927. Oh, by the way, I will bring some books to distribute. Anyone else who wishes to may also do so. Udhay [1] http://bangalore.burrp.com/listing/silver-wok_richmond-road_bangalore_bars-pubs-restaurants/158184851 -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] PGP/MIME or inline PGP?
Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote, [on 5/7/2010 6:49 AM]: I hardly ever sign my email .. what's not worth encrypting is almost always not worth signing either. More deniability too. :) Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] PGP/MIME or inline PGP?
Udhay Shankar N [07/05/10 06:59 +0530]: Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote, [on 5/7/2010 6:49 AM]: I hardly ever sign my email .. what's not worth encrypting is almost always not worth signing either. More deniability too. :) Nah. More than enough tells .. hardly anybody at all sends from frodo.hserus.net eh I dumped my tinfoil hat in the trash ages ago. So dont use pgp to the extent that it becomes a nuisance for everybody else.
Re: [silk] Silk Meet?
Hello, Sorry for the late notice. I will be there too. And I might bring some books although my collection is not that impressive. Regards, - Bharat On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 6:50 AM, Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com wrote: Xxxrum wrote, [on 5/6/2010 11:26 PM]: Hey Udhay Till what time are yu going to hang out?also send me yr mobile number I will ask for a table for 7-8 people at Silver Wok [1] at around 7:30pm. We should be there a while. Anyone who needs directions can call the restaurant, or me at 98450 74927. Oh, by the way, I will bring some books to distribute. Anyone else who wishes to may also do so. Udhay [1] http://bangalore.burrp.com/listing/silver-wok_richmond-road_bangalore_bars-pubs-restaurants/158184851 -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
