Alan Jacobs

Who doesn’t love buying online? It offers a bigger selection for less money, ordered from the privacy of your home and delivered there too. But if e-commerce is great for consumers, it is more problematic for citizens. The sales tax that people pay in physical stores helps pay for the upkeep of their communities. The physical stores also provide employment; these workers can afford in turn to buy things and thus keep the economy afloat. Few such benefits flow from e-commerce.

I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world,“ said Oatley. "The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. We usually take the exterior view of others, but that’s too limited.

One of the little-talked-about dynamics of the mobile phone industry is the huge proportion of profits that come from the 2-3 per cent of people with very very large Pay As You Go phone bills. These people spend £100-£200 per month on their prepay phone bill in the UK; double or triple the cost of a contract phone (and ten times the average for prepay). What makes you pay thousands of pounds over the odds on your phone each year? Could it be that prepay phones can’t be traced? We’ve all seen The Wire.

As a result, mobile phone numbers appear on everything from colourful cards in phone boxes advertising personal services, to rocks in remote valleys of Afghanistan recruiting jihadists for the Taliban. The very small number of very high spend pre-pay mobile phone customers provide 15-20 per cent of the profits of consumer mobile phone businesses in the UK. That’s billions of pounds of profit from enabling anonymity.

In the 1950s, a long-past GM CEO who had been appointed secretary of defense said that “for years, I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” That CEO, Charles Wilson, got misquoted as saying, “What’s good for GM is good for the country.” At the time, it was something to be embarrassed about. Or at least it sounded a little ridiculous to conflate your narrow corporate interests with the collective interests of the country, even if you were the nation’s largest company.

Now, by transforming tax fights into skirmishes over how many jobs this or that tax will “kill,” every single tax becomes something that hurts America. The narrow (and self-serving) interests of every tax-fighting corporation become part of our national project. And the battlefield becomes the competing spreadsheets of political opponents who say that one plan or another will create more jobs, when it’s pretty obvious that no one knows precisely how that whole mechanism works.

In Newton’s second year [at Cambridge], having filled the beginning and end of his notebook with Aristotle, he started a new section deep inside: Questiones quædam philosophicæ — some philosophical questions. He set authority aside. Later he came back to this page and inscribed an epigraph borrowed from Aristotle’s justification for dissenting from his teacher. Aristotle had said, “Plato is my friend, but truth my greater friend.” Newton inserted Aristotle’s name in sequence: Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas. He made a new beginning. He set down his knowledge of the world, organized under elemental headings, expressed as questions, based sometimes on his reading, sometimes on speculation. It showed how little was known, altogether. The choice of topics — forty-five in all — suggested a foundation for a new natural philosophy.

What government a nation can bear depends on the condition of the general mind; if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.

A friend called a few weeks ago to tell me about a skyscraper that had to be evacuated after an earthquake in Seoul. For ten minutes the building made wide metronomic swings. Thing was, there had been no earthquake registered in the area. It was a mysteriously super local event. After a two-week investigation, the epicenter had been narrowed down to the building’s twelfth floor gym where the side kicking, upper-cutting, and fist-jabbing of seventeen middle-aged Korean women boxercising to Snap’s 1990s hit “I’ve got the Power” seemed somehow to have hit the building’s resonant frequency, sending the whole structure into convulsions. Surely the gods thought they were doing Seoul’s Technomart a good turn when, at the beginning of time, they decided out of all possible pasts and futures, for this building’s Achilles’ heel to be the improbably collection of seventeen Korean women on the wrong side of forty paired with 1990s American infomercial exercise culture.

theatlantic:

A Jobs Plan for the Post-Cubicle Economy

About 150 years ago, American workers began a profound shift from farms to factories. After suffering through poor work conditions, low pay, and no workplace protections, the workers organized and successfully helped build the framework of laws that became known as FDR’s New Deal. This landmark legislation from the 1930s protected workers and supported labor unions by limiting the number of hours that could be worked and setting a baseline minimum pay. But from a larger perspective, the New Deal demonstrated that government had acknowledged the shift in the U.S. workforce, heard their voice, and created a new system in which they could thrive.

Now we find ourselves in the middle of an equally large transition: just as workers left the plow for the assembly line, they are now leaving the cubicle for the coffee shop. Welcome to the Gig Economy, where over 42 million Americans are working independently - as freelancers, part-timers, consultants, contractors, and the self-employed. They are simultaneously holding multiple jobs, working for different employers, and mastering diverse skills. They are accountants and fashion designers and website architects. And, they are completely left out of the New Deal, which protects the rest of the workforce.

Read more at The Atlantic

C’est pourtant le grand défi de l’Occident, s’adapter au monde qu’il a créé. Un beau sujet philosophique.

— Michel Serres. The concluding sentences of that interview. As concise and pressing a way of describing the current situation as I have seen. We have made a cultural (and material) environment that we do not yet know how to adapt to. I think of some lines from Auden’s poem “Friday’s Child” about the human Mind:

Though instruments at Its command Make wish and counterwish come true, It clearly cannot understand What It can clearly do.

A la génération précédente, un professeur de sciences à la Sorbonne transmettait presque 70% de ce qu’il avait appris sur les mêmes bancs vingt ou trente ans plus tôt. Elèves et enseignants vivaient dans le même monde. Aujourd’hui, 80% de ce qu’a appris ce professeur est obsolète. Et même pour les 20% qui restent, le professeur n’est plus indispensable, car on peut tout savoir sans sortir de chez soi ! Pour ma part, je trouve cela miraculeux. Quand j’ai un vers latin dans la tête, je tape quelques mots et tout arrive : le poème, l’Enéide, le livre IV… Imaginez le temps qu’il faudrait pour retrouver tout cela dans les livres ! Je ne mets plus les pieds en bibliothèque. L’université vit une crise terrible, car le savoir, accessible partout et immédiatement, n’a plus le même statut. Et donc les relations entre élèves et enseignants ont changé. Mais personnellement, cela ne m’inquiète pas. Car j’ai compris avec le temps, en quarante ans d’enseignement, qu’on ne transmet pas quelque chose, mais soi. C’est le seul conseil que je suis en mesure de donner à mes successeurs et même aux parents: soyez vous-mêmes! Mais ce n’est pas facile d’être soi-même.