1,810 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2015
  2. Apr 2015
    1. Which world currency is currently experiencing among the most dramatic deflationary spirals anyone has ever seen? Bitcoin itself, the ‘existential threat to the liberal nation state’. 32 Any sane person putting their life’s savings into Bitcoin among all world cur - rencies right now is as foolish as a Dutch person buying tulip bulbs. That is because the problems with currencies actually aren’t formal, or mechanical, or algorithmic, despite what Bitcoin propagandists desperately want us to believe. They are social and political problems that can only be solved by political mechanisms. T

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  3. Feb 2015
    1. Free marketeers are claiming that if we build enough luxury housing it will eventually trickle down and turn into housing for the poor and middle class. This is the failed policy of Reaganomics at its worst.

      The value of a unit depreciates with time (normalized for any trend in overall prices). That's a very different scenario than taxes.

    2. If the invisible hand of simple supply-side economics worked, then the overwhelming demand for affordability would lead developers to build housing that actually meets the needs of the majority of our residents. Unfortunately, affordable housing is difficult to build and sometimes more expensive to finance than high profit pied-à-terres and luxury apartments. In the last 7 years we've built over 23,000 luxury units, and only 1,200 units for middle class families.

      The issue with this paragraph is that it assumes regulation is not to blame for the high cost of affordable housing. It may well be the case that it is.

  4. Jan 2015
    1. It seemed clear to me that this framing of Internet freedom as a pillar of US foreign policy threatened to undermine whatever potential the new tools and platform had for creating an alternative public sphere

      But what is that potential, does it really exist?

  5. Feb 2014
    1. U.S. property policy remains largely fixed in its establishe d mindset of defending intellectual property rights for their own sake, instead of as a means to encourage innovation.
    2. The U.S. policy response followed an established pattern of defending intellectual property holders’ rights with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
    3. The U . S . Co nstitution firmly grounds the proper role of intellectual property policy as utilitarian .

      Identify where/how this ground is established.

  6. Jan 2014
    1. Policies and procedures sometimes serve as an active rather than passive barrier to data sharing. Campbell et al. (2003) reported that government agencies often have strict policies about secrecy for some publicly funded research. In a survey of 79 technology transfer officers in American universities, 93% reported that their institution had a formal policy that required researchers to file an invention disclosure before seeking to commercialize research results. About one-half of the participants reported institutional policies that prohibited the dissemination of biomaterials without a material transfer agreement, which have become so complex and demanding that they inhibit sharing [15].

      Policies and procedures are barriers, but there are many more barriers beyond that which get in the way first.

    1. Eliminating a formal policy and forgoing expense account police shifted responsibility to frontline managers, where it belongs.