doop HQ, Junior

Nietzsche’s Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek | The Nation

Fri, 17 May 2013 08:39:05 +0530

Nietzsche’s Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek | The Nation:

In their war against socialism, the
philosophers of capital faced two challenges.
The first was that by the early twentieth
century, socialism had cornered the market
on morality. As Mises complained in his
1932 preface to the second edition of
Socialism , “Any advocate of socialistic
measures is looked upon as the friend of the
Good, the Noble, and the Moral, as a
disinterested pioneer of necessary reforms, in
short, as a man who unselfishly serves his
own people and all humanity.” Indeed, with
the help of kindred notions such as “social
justice,” socialism seemed to be the very
definition of morality. Nietzsche had long
been wise to this insinuation; one source of
his discontent with religion was his sense
that it had bequeathed to modernity an
understanding of what morality entailed
(selflessness, universality, equality) such that
only socialism and democracy could be said
to fulfill it. But where Nietzsche’s response to
the equation of socialism and morality was
to question the value of morality, at least as
it had been customarily understood,
economists like Mises and Hayek pursued a
different path, one Nietzsche would never
have dared to take: they made the market the
very expression of morality.

"I am one of the people who will define the decency of destruction. And I am going write this..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:01:20 +0530

“I am one of the people who will define the decency of destruction. And I am going write this definition while I look at every single photo shot in Boston. I’m going to do this because it is my job during major national crises. I am the de facto photo editor for a Midwest news organization’s website. This isn’t what I normally do. Nope. Not at all. Most days I am the pond scum of the news gathering world. I am the toe cheese of the newsroom. I am a news aggregator, which is the ambiguous way of saying that I steal other people’s work, change just enough so I can’t be accused of plagiarism, and all the real reporter gets is one lousy link in the third paragraph. But then there are days like the London bombings, Sandy Hook or Boston. These days are different because the newsroom’s unwritten emergency response plan includes temporarily promoting me from pond scum to photo editor.”

- I’m A Photo Editor for a News Organization and I Looked At Every Single Photo Taken At The Boston Marathon Bombing | xoJane

The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:06:06 +0530

The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See:

tetw:

by Michael Finkel

Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet.

Wow

"Analyzing data is as old as tabulating a record of all the Pharaoh’s bags in the royal granary, but..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:02:48 +0530

“Analyzing data is as old as tabulating a record of all the Pharaoh’s bags in the royal granary, but now that you can’t saydata without putting “big” in front of it, the—very necessary—practice of data analysis has been swept upin a larger and less helpful fad. Here, for example, is a post exhorting readers to “Incorporate Big Data Into Your Small Business”that is about a quantity of data thatprobably wouldn’t strain Google Docs, much less Excel on a single laptop. Analyzing data is as old as tabulating a record of all the Pharaoh’s bags in the royal granary, but now that you can’t saydata without putting “big” in front of it, the—very necessary—practice of data analysis has been swept upin a larger and less helpful fad. Here, for example, is a post exhorting readers to “Incorporate Big Data Into Your Small Business”that is about a quantity of data thatprobably wouldn’t strain Google Docs, much less Excel on a single laptop. Analyzing data is as old as tabulating a record of all the Pharaoh’s bags in the royal granary, but now that you can’t saydata without putting “big” in front of it, the—very necessary—practice of data analysis has been swept upin a larger and less helpful fad. Here, for example, is a post exhorting readers to “Incorporate Big Data Into Your Small Business”that is about a quantity of data thatprobably wouldn’t strain Google Docs, much less Excel on a single laptop.”

- http://qz.com/81661/most-data-isnt-big-and-businesses-are-wasting-money-pretending-it-is/

"Tony built the original Arc Reactor — the one thing that makes the suit work — as part..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:34:04 +0530

“Tony built the original Arc Reactor — the one thing that makes the suit work — as part of a government contract. Hell, the original armor prototype he threw together in the cave was built out of parts from missiles he created under another defense department contract. All of that research and development was done on the taxpayer’s dime, and then Tony uses it to turn himself into a superhero and claims that nobody else has a right to put their filthy paws on it. In reality, it would be illegal for Tony to use an Arc Reactor to power his goddamn TiVo, let alone use it to fly halfway around the world and punch tanks in half (which incidentally is also illegal, because crossing national borders with that suit constitutes the trafficking of defense technology).”

- 5 Marvel Characters Who Totally Dropped the Ball | Cracked.com

"In reality, however, a 401(k) plan is an icon of futility and the way in which the owners of capital..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:15:41 +0530

“In reality, however, a 401(k) plan is an icon of futility and the way in which the owners of capital extract rents from the owners of labor. Yves Smith is good on this, as is Matt Yglesias, although the real expert is Helaine Olen: the 401(k) is a way for both your government and your employer to disown you, and to leave your life savings to be raided by the financial-services industry and its plethora of hidden and invidious fees. The well-kept secret about old-fashioned pension funds is that, for the most part, they’re actually very good at generating decent returns for their beneficiaries. They tend to have extremely long time horizons, and are run by professionals who know what they’re doing and who have a fair amount of negotiating leverage when they deal with Wall Street. Savers are always strengthened by being united: disaggregating them and forcing them to take matters into their own hands is tantamount to feeding them directly to the Wall Street sharks”

- The systemic plight of labor | Felix Salmon

"[…]it’s simply wrong that today’s world is “tailored” for anybody who happens to be..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:14:09 +0530

“[…]it’s simply wrong that today’s world is “tailored” for anybody who happens to be “self-motivated”. Both the self and the motivation are components of labor, not capital, and as such they’re on the losing side of the global economy, not the winning side.”

- The systemic plight of labor | Felix Salmon

"My real frustration was not that I had to be the family Apple Genius. My frustration was that they..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:59:05 +0530

“My real frustration was not that I had to be the family Apple Genius. My frustration was that they needed my help to begin with because the experiences of these products was so complicated.”

- Designing for people who did NOT grow up with the Internet — Design Startups — Medium

"The Pentagon claims it aims to “portray the military as it actually is,” but don’t planes sometimes..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:32:06 +0530

“The Pentagon claims it aims to “portray the military as it actually is,” but don’t planes sometimes have technical difficulties? Doesn’t torture sometimes lead to bad information? Don’t soldiers come home with post-traumatic stress because the enemies are human, not vague abstractions? Does the Pentagon truly want to “accurately portray” history? Let’s examine two cases studies. The first is the 2000 movie, Thirteen Days, in which the military brass urges President Kennedy to engage Cuba militarily. David Robb recalls that Pentagon pushed the producers to tone down the implications, but they refused and went without military assistance – a risky move since, “most studio heads tell their producers, ‘We’re not going to make this film unless we get military assistance, because it would be too expensive. So you’d better make sure the script conforms to what they want.’” One such case is Charlie Wilson’s War, the movie about Charlie Wilson’s attempts to aid the Mujahedeen during our proxy war with Russia in Afghanistan. In the original script, says Matthew Alford, in an interview with Al Jazeera [30:00] “there is a very clear link between the U.S. arming the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the causes of 9/11. Now, we know from a CIA advisor who was on set, he says ‘we deliberately made sure we excised that film.’” I asked Alford, author of Reel Time: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, whether the Pentagon’s thumbs down had ever silenced a movie entirely. He cited Countermeasures, a 1994 movie that requested an aircraft carrier but was turned down because, “There’s no reason for us to denigrate the White House or remind the public of the Iran-Contra affair.” As to the “accurate portrayal” question, he replied, “Since when was it ‘realistic’ for the US military to go to war against Transformers?””

- Propaganda and Censorship: The Hollywood Industrial Complex
(via jayaprada)

"It is tempting to embrace all the new ‘stuff’ that comes out almost daily. For example,..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:27:45 +0530

“It is tempting to embrace all the new ‘stuff’ that comes out almost daily. For example, photographing landscapes, wildlife, close ups, architecture, portraits, weddings, cars, pets and more. Using HDR, collages, textures, blending, plug ins, layers and more. Printing on watercolor, glossy, luster, bamboo, Baryta and other papers. Mounting and framing with white mats, colored mats, decorated mats and more. Mounting photos on wood, aluminum, Gatorboard, acrylic and so on. Marketing by offering prints in 12 different sizes, in both ‘fine art’ and ‘poster’ form, matted in 32 different mat colors, framed in 17 different moldings, all with the choices of papers and mountings that I previously mentioned. That’s cool. And if you can do all this it is certainly very impressive. But besides shortening your life expectancy due to the resulting stress, it will do nothing to define your personal style.”

- Vision Part 2-About Fine Art Photography

"People are the problem, not technology. Every leap forward in our access to one another, every..."

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:43:57 +0530

“People are the problem, not technology. Every leap forward in our access to one another, every period in the intensification of discourse and debate, inevitably generates the question What are the appropriate limits of speech? After the explosion of pamphlet culture in the seventeenth century — which created a froth of furious, often anonymous debate — the English created the Royal Society to regulate discourse and verify authorial integrity, as well as to establish a common framework for exchange.”

- There Are No Saints Online - Stephen Marche on Internet Hate - Esquire

"The Twitter age has lit a bonfire of the inanities."

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 06:36:19 +0530

“The Twitter age has lit a bonfire of the inanities.”

- Rob Steen: Where do we draw the line on Twitter outbursts? | Cricinfo Magazine | ESPN Cricinfo

"Historically, money arose from, and in conjunction with, this power. (This point has been made..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:12:24 +0530

“Historically, money arose from, and in conjunction with, this power. (This point has been made repeatedly over the years, most recently in David Graeber’s controversial Debt: The First 5000 Years, a surprise publishing hit for an anthropologist. ) By contrast, Bitcoin looks more like the “just so” story, commonly told in economics textbooks, in which money arises to simplify what would otherwise be complex and cumbersome barter transactions.”

- Commentary: The Bitcoin Bubble and a Bad Hypothesis | The National Interest

"So why is it that people engage… why is it that powerful organizations - there is all sorts of..."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:43:30 +0530

“So why is it that people engage… why is it that powerful organizations - there is all sorts of reasons why non-powerful organizations engage in secrecy, which to my view is legitimate, they need it, because they are powerless. But why do powerful organizations engage in secrecy? Well, usually because the plans that they have if made public would be opposed by the public.”

- Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt

"My waxing rhapsodic over the X-Pro 1 may simply have come about because I spent the previous four..."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:28:16 +0530

“My waxing rhapsodic over the X-Pro 1 may simply have come about because I spent the previous four months in Mexico doing thousands of frames of street shooting primarily with a Sony NEX-7; a camera with the personality of a toaster oven (and one that occasionally burns the toast). To be sure, it’s a fine camera in terms of image quality, and with most of the features that one might want, but one that is simply not engaging as a craftsman’s tool. (The Sony RX1 on the other hand exudes character along with performance. Shows how one company can get it so wrong and also so right).”

- A Matter of Character

"You don’t have that much time to work with. You are going to get a very few number of things done...."

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:19:39 +0530

“You don’t have that much time to work with. You are going to get a very few number of things done. You are going to get way fewer things done than you think you’re going to get done. And those things will take you much longer than you plan for. Much as you must talk to teens about drinking, you must talk to your team about productivity.”

- How the Productivity Myth is Killing Your Startup — about work — Medium

"There’s nothing wrong per se with paying more attention to tragedy and violence that happens..."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:20:55 +0530

“There’s nothing wrong per se with paying more attention to tragedy and violence that happens relatively nearby and in familiar places. Whether wrong or not, it’s probably human nature, or at least human instinct, to do that, and that happens all over the world. I’m not criticizing that. But one wishes that the empathy for victims and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence would at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does (far, far more often than it is targeted by such violence).”

- The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

"People don’t want to feel like a piece of meat. The hit and run style of street shooting leaves..."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:53:13 +0530

“People don’t want to feel like a piece of meat. The hit and run style of street shooting leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth. It gives off the impression that you really are taking something from them, instead of having a meaningful exchange. If you are going to take their picture, spend a little time getting to know them. All to often, I see photographers hurry through scenes only to come out the other end with images that feel like they were taken in passing.”

- Can I Take Your Picture | Adam Marelli Photo

"I heard heavy breathing and footsteps: Cheu, Cheu, Cheu,” Tulsi continues. “I thought it was some..."

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:51:12 +0530

““I heard heavy breathing and footsteps: Cheu, Cheu, Cheu,” Tulsi continues. “I thought it was some aatma-vaatma (a spirit) from the graveyard.” He prayed and ran to his guesthouse. When he arrived, the heavy breathing had stopped. “It was me,” he says. So were the footsteps. As he then realised: “The soles of my chappals had come loose.” Tulsi, 67, has created something of a life around it as a director of 29 horror movies, but this is the closest he has come to a paranormal experience. At a time when the average Hindi film took about a year and 50 lakhs to complete, Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche was shot in 40 days on a budget of Rs 3.5 lakhs. Here’s how it was done: seven brothers boarded buses with small-time actors, a sparse film crew, their wives and their mother and father and drove to a government guesthouse in Mahabaleshwar that cost Rs 12 a room – they took eight rooms. They didn’t spend on sets because they shot on location. They didn’t spend on costumes because these were picked out of actors’ wardrobes. The cameras were all borrowed. The eldest brother Kumar wrote the script. Tulsi and Shyam directed (most Ramsay films bear the directorial credit “Tulsi-Shyam”). Kiran worked on sound. Gangu was the cinematographer. Keshu assisted him and handled production too. Arjun helped with production, but mainly worked on the edits. Their mother Kishni and her daughters-in-law cooked and helped with makeup. “We would sleep for four hours a day and shoot for eighteen,” Tulsi says. When it was complete, they publicised the movie on radio, mostly with faux-scary voice ads. The film ran to full houses in the first week after its release. It made Rs 45 lakhs.”

- Ramsay International - Ghost Stories - Motherland Magazine

"This quest for digital omniscience, though understandable, is self-defeating. Most of the..."

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:18:20 +0530

“This quest for digital omniscience, though understandable, is self-defeating. Most of the information we get at lightning speed is so temporal as to be stale by the time it reaches us. We scramble over the buttons of the car radio in an effort to get to the right station at the right minute-after-the-hour for the traffic report. Yet the report itself warns us to avoid jams that have long since been cleared, while telling us nothing about the one in which we’re currently stuck—one they’ll find out about only if we ourselves call it in to their special number. The irony is that while we’re busily trying to keep up with all this information, the information is trying and failing to keep up with us.”

- Present Shock — Book Excerpts — Medium