From the National Post:
Why aren’t the newspapers in Europe going under? It’s not that newspapers in Europe are having an easy time – again, we’re in an economic recession that’s worldwide, but why aren’t they going under? The American newspapers, oh they say ‘It’s the Internet. Papers are getting killed by the Internet.’ Last I’ve [...]
Progress is the problem
Illich was the first to point out to me the potentially toxic nature of the idea[l] of “progress.” And I have yet to come up with a satisfactory outlook on how to couch progress in a consistent, empowering, and safe way. I don’t want an asymptotic vision of progress that [...]
Social reforms involving a minority1 approach their task with a mixture of two strategies:
Changing the way those in power perceive those whom you seek to help.
Changing the way those whom you seek to help present themselves to those in power.
This is not as subtle a statement as I’ve made it seem2 . There is [...]
I hope that this instructable is portentous:
The stock cupholder tray between the front seats of the Honda Odyssey is a well-known spill hazard.
It is possible to modify the stock cupholders to make them less prone to spill.
This instructable gives you step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
Think about this: someone, dissatisfied with their Honda, wants [...]
I discovered the Smith-Hughes Act through “Shop Class as Soulcraft” (PDF)1
The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training in two forms: as part of general education and as a separate vocational program. The invention of modern shop class thus serviced both cultural reflexes of the Arts and Crafts movement at once. The [...]
Heard from a person talking into a cellphone. Emphasis hers.
G: He wants to become a high-powered hedge fund manager. That’s what everyone wants to do.
A strange juxtaposition from the Death and Taxes site for the budget graph, visualizing the relative proportions of the national budget by department and project:
It reminds me of the the first chapter of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, wherein Carnegie recounts the capture of infamous gunman, “Two Gun” Crowley. During [...]
I’m going to constrain the meanings of these words for this post. People bandy them about, but there are some essential differences that call for their distinction.
Opportunities are the chance to do something, the chance at something. Rights are guarantees that are (morally or ethically) inviolable. Privilege are opportunities accorded by virtue [...]
And that’s a pretty big idea.
Recently, I commented that one element of Ivan Illich’s work I really appreciate is his focus on infrastructure that addresses needs emergently, rather than focusing on one-step solutions to solving social problems. Too frequently, this one-step bias leads to treating symptoms and leaving causes unaddressed1.
Among other things, this same, [...]
This morning, I was taking a nap on the floor in a basement hallway. The steam pipes below ground warm the floor in certain areas; so when I’m cold, I often search out these hotspots.
About forty minutes later, an MIT Police officer woke me, asking for identification. He had received a call for [...]
Or so said a friend of Nagle’s. He pointed out that Americans are often not only obsessed with things, but with the process of buying them. Being a “good shopper,” or “going shopping” are ideas that are significant independent of what is being bought. I’m not quite sure how this dovetails with the [...]
There are no salesmen, no scams, no horizontal integration—nothing corporate about [education]!
It’s funny how helpful it is to encapsulate big ideas concisely: “Education is a commodity” leads directly to daily realizations about what I see around me in school and media. It’s a pretty helpful strategy when you’re thinking about [...]
Are [students] buyers or sellers?
On one hand, we’re very literally customers in the sense that we pay for college to “receive” an education. But anyone who has gone through the college application process knows that the economics involved is more complex than that.
In a pretty neat essay I ran [...]
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