161 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
  2. Oct 2024
    1. the rulers are no longer Kings presidents or prime ministers but the market economy for the B this is the first time that the ruler is an economic agent instead of a political one

      for - adjacency - the largest companies in the world have more capital than many countries - the society of the spectacle - lobby industry

      adjacency - between - the largest multi-national companies in the world have more capital than many countries - the society of the spectacle - adjacency relationship - It is a well publicized fact that the world's largest multi-national companies have more capital than many countries - This fact is a prime example of the conclusions of the society of the spectacle, - Governments are coopted to serve the needs of the multi-nationals through corporate lobbyists - In fact, multi-national corporations are called "multi-national" precisely because they are so large that they exceed the boundaries of nation states, they are LARGER than nation states - Advertising, movies and products all flow trans-nationally across political boundaries - Military weapons developed by the military industrial complex and sold to nation states make modern warefare between them exponentially more harmful - In the end, the elites within such corporations benefit from the most from the consumption - The diversion is towards maximizing their profits at the expense of all else: - people - the environment - life on earth

  3. Aug 2024
    1. More than three-quarters of Carlyle’s energy investments are in fossil fuels, and just over 60% of its 2022 first half profits came through its subsidiary NGP Energy Capital, which focuses almost exclusively on oil and gas projects.
  4. Jul 2024
    1. "The factory cannot only look at the profit index. It must distribute wealth, culture, services, democracy. I think factory for man, not man for factory, right? The divisions between capital and labour, industry and agriculture, production and culture must be overcome. Sometimes, when I work late I see the lights of the workers working double shifts, the clerks, the engineers, and I feel like going to pay my respects." —Adriano Olivetti
  5. Jun 2024
    1. Louis Menand summarized the mid-centurysituation and Macdonald’s thinking as follows: “There was a majormiddle-class culture of earnest aspiration in the 1950s, the productof a strange alliance of the democratic (culture for everyone) and theelitist (culture can make you better than other people).

      note here, again, the idea of culture as "capital":

      culture can make you better than other people

    2. By acknowledging individuals, a democratic culture respects differ-ence. As a collective lived experience, it distributes cultural capitalto those individuals via educational institutions (broadly conceived,public, and private).
    3. Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of “cultural capital”

      note that the use of "capital" with respect to culture commodifies it and frames it in an economic context here.

      How is one to earn and then later spend this capital? How might it be quantified?

  6. May 2024
    1. In den Ländern, die sich in Paris 2015 einer Initiative gegen das Verbrennen von nicht genutztem Erdgas (flaring) angeschlossen hatten, wird das Verbrennen mit offener Flamme oft nur durch Verbrennung in geschlossenen Anlagen ersetzt, wie eine investigative journalistische Recherche ergab. Die Menge der Emissionen sinkt dadurch nicht wesentlich, aber diese Anlagen sind für Satelliten nicht äußerlich erkennbar. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/may/02/methane-emissions-gas-flaring-hidden-satellite-monitors-oil-gas

      Ressourcen für die Recherche zu Methan-Emissionen: https://gijn.org/resource/new-tools-investigate-methane-emissions/

  7. Jan 2024
    1. the canonical unit, the NCU supports natural capital accounting, currency source, calculating and accounting for ecosystem services, and influences how a variety of governance issues are resolved
      • for: canonical unit, collaborative commons - missing part - open learning commons, question - process trap - natural capital

      • comment

        • in this context, indyweb and Indranet are not the canonical unit, but then, it seems the model is fundamentally missing the functionality provided but the Indyweb and Indranet, which is and open learning system.
        • without such an open learning system that captures the essence of his humans learn, the activity of problem-solving cannot be properly contextualised, along with all of limitations leading to progress traps.
        • The entire approach of posing a problem, then solving it is inherently limited due to the fractal intertwingularity of reality.
      • question: progress trap - natural capital

        • It is important to be aware that there is a real potential for a progress trap to emerge here, as any metric is liable to be abused
    1. Which is exactly what you do in the book. And what did you find? - So what I do, I take apart the operating system of capitalism, which is, and I look at seven myths, really that drive it.
      • for: book - wealth supremacy - 7 myths, 7 myths of Capitalism, capital bias, definition - capital bias

      • DESCRIPTION: 7 MYTHS of CAPITALISM

        • The Myth of Maximization
          • example of absurdity of maximization
            • Bill Gates had $10 billion. Then he invested it and got $300 billion. There's no limit to how much wealth an individual can accumulate. It is absurd.
        • Myth of the Income Statement
          • Gains to capital called profit is always to be increased and
          • Gains of labor is called an expense, is always to be decreased
        • Myth of Materiality (also called capital bias)
        • definition: capital bias
          • If something impacts capital, it matters
          • If something impacts society or ecology, it doesn't matter
        • With the capital bias, only accumulating more capital matters. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. This is how most accountants and CFO's view the world.
      • quote: Laura Flanders

        • The capital is what matters. We're aiming for more capital and nothing else really matters. That's the operating system of the economy. So the real world is immaterial to this world of wealth as held in stocks and shares and financial instruments.
  8. Dec 2023
    1. This leads to a sense of belonging, more trust and solidarity among each other.
      • for: community group - building social capital, recommunitifying the community, recommunitify the community

      new portmanteau: recommunitify - means to put community back in the world community, to build social capital in a community that is lacking it

  9. Nov 2023
  10. Oct 2023
    1. People used stones to carry out the death penalty against people who had violated laws forbidding adultery, apostasy, blasphemy, profanation of the Sabbath, child sacrifice, witchcraft, and soothsaying.
  11. Jun 2023
    1. Being a ‘homo ioci plenus’ – a man full of wit – meant something in Rütiner’s friendship group, and knowing how to bring the house down was one way to display one’s communicative capital.

      Relationship to sprezzatura?

    2. Roth calls this ‘communicative capital’: a storehouse of material to be deployed in conversation to build status, reputation and wealth.
  12. Jan 2023
    1. Ryan Randall @ryanrandall@hcommons.socialEarnest but still solidifying #pkm take:The ever-rising popularity of personal knowledge management tools indexes the need for liberal arts approaches. Particularly, but not exclusively, in STEM education.When people widely reinvent the concept/practice of commonplace books without building on centuries of prior knowledge (currently institutionalized in fields like library & information studies, English, rhetoric & composition, or media & communication studies), that's not "innovation."Instead, we're seeing some unfortunate combination of lost knowledge, missed opportunities, and capitalism selectively forgetting in order to manufacture a market.

      https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/109677171177320098

    1. the   true source of economic prosperity is not  financial capitalism investment in education   investment in the real economy in infrastructure  and you know when the in the middle of the 20th   century in the 1950s 1960s when the u.s had were  in a situation of economic dominance over the rest   00:54:32 of the world it was not through extreme financial  inequality except you know you had 19 percent top   income tax rate after roosevelt and but you had  a big educational advance as compared to you   know at that time you had a 90 percent of a court  would go to high school in the us in 1950s 1960s   at the same time it was 20  30 percent in germany or in   00:54:56 france or so and this was this educational  advance which made prosperity historically and and   and we seem to to have forgotten this uh you know  in the us following you know since the 1980s but   so we we have to manage to put this back on the on  this agenda but that's that's of course that's not   that's not easy

      !- Thomas Piketty : The real source of wealth - is investing in real value such as education, infrastructure, skills, etc, NOT financial capitalism - In the 1950's the US dominated other countries through real investments in education. They led other countries so had more skilled workers that increased productivity enormously - We have to pivot away from illusory financial capital and real capital

    2. i don't feel like we have any major  uh disagreement about you know everything you just   said michael uh let me say also regarding you know  my book capital in the 21st century you know it's   a book that has lots of limitations and and you  know i have on many issues you know i've tried to   00:26:31 to to to make progress since then so this  was written 10 years ago i wrote capital   and ideology much more recently which i  think addresses some of the shortcomings   but this is and still this book has also a  lot of limitations so you know i'm trying to   make progress all the time and i certainly  don't pretend that all the answers are in   you know one book and that being said i think you  know many many things that you've mentioned you   know again i fully agree with

      !- Thomas Piketty : Agreement with Michael and limitations of past books - Piketty states that every book has a lot of limitations. Capital and Ideology is his recent book and addresses some of the shortcomings of Capital in the 21st Century

    1. Os ETFs (exchange traded funds) ou fundos de índice também integram a classe dos fundos de investimento. Porém, as suas cotas são negociadas na bolsa de valores brasileira, sendo necessário ter uma plataforma de acesso ao mercado para adquiri-las — como um home broker.
    2. Os fundos de investimentos são veículos de investimento coletivos que podem ser encontrados nas plataformas das melhores corretoras de valores — como a Genial Investimentos. Eles são formados pelo capital de múltiplos investidores que detêm interesses em comum.
    3. A principal vantagem de um BDR é que eles contam com a possibilidade de pagamento de dividendos. Isso porque, a depositária repassa aos titulares dos certificados os valores que ela recebe pelo investimento no país de origem.
    4. BDR é a sigla para brazilian depositary receipts ou, em tradução literal, recibo depositário brasileiro. Trata-se de um investimento de renda variável negociado na bolsa de valores, que está lastreado em uma alternativa internacional. Para que um BDR seja emitido, é necessária a atuação de uma instituição depositária. Ela fará o investimento no exterior e o depositará junto a um agente custodiante. Isso impede que o investimento internacional seja negociado ou vendido.
    5. Por exemplo, existem ETFs que seguem índices compostos de REITs (real estate investment trusts), os fundos imobiliários norte-americanos. Nesse caso, você poderá se expor ao mercado imobiliário dos Estados Unidos, sem precisar sair do Brasil.
    6. Um exemplo clássico é o S&P 500 (Standard and Poor’s 500), composto pelas 500 maiores empresas do mercado norte-americano. Nesse caso, ao investir em apenas uma cota de um ETF atrelado ao S&P 500, você terá exposição indireta a diversas empresas dolarizadas.
    7. Assim, o modo mais prático, acessível e seguro é buscar por investimentos no mercado financeiro nacional que permitam a exposição ao dólar.
  13. Dec 2022
    1. Human capital consists of those skills and resources that eachof us brings into the labor market. They include the quantity and quality ofeducation we have attained, job training received, acquired skills and experi-ence, aptitudes and abilities, and so on.
  14. Oct 2022
    1. Business ModelWill I get charged at some point? How do you make money to run this product?TBD

      "TBD 🚀🚀🚀" is such a bad indication for the future of a product

  15. Sep 2022
  16. Jun 2022
    1. It was as if Silicon Valley had made a secret pact to subsidize the lifestyles of urban Millennials. As I pointed out three years ago, if you woke up on a Casper mattress, worked out with a Peloton, Ubered to a WeWork, ordered on DoorDash for lunch, took a Lyft home, and ordered dinner through Postmates only to realize your partner had already started on a Blue Apron meal, your household had, in one day, interacted with eight unprofitable companies that collectively lost about $15 billion in one year.

      ...but we'll make up for it in volume.

  17. May 2022
    1. We've had three things happen simultaneously: we've moved from an open web where people start lots of small projects to one where it really feels like if you're not on a Facebook or a YouTube, you're not going to reach a billion users, and at that point, why is it worth doing this? Second, we've developed a financial model of surveillance capitalism, where the default model for all of these tools is we're going to collect as much information as we can about you and monetize your attention. Then we've developed a model for financing these, which is venture capital, where we basically say it is your job to grow as quickly as possible, to get to the point where you have a near monopoly on a space and you can charge monopoly rents. Get rid of two aspects of that equation and things are quite different.

      How We Got Here: Concentration of Reach, Surveillance Capitalism, and Venture Capital

      These three things combined drove the internet's trajectory. Without these three components, we wouldn't have seen the concentration of private social spaces and the problems that came with them.

  18. Apr 2022
    1. The model of high fixed cost, low marginal cost applies to pretty much every consumer good or service sold in the industrial age. If you think publishing the first copy of a piece of software is hard, try setting up a new production line in a factory, or opening a restaurant, or producing a music album or movie.
  19. Mar 2022
    1. Surveillance technologies, especially those backed by significant amounts of venture capital, areoften underpinned by the same precarious labour and outsourcing practices that are critiqued fromwithin the academy

      Ah, vulture capitalism.

    1. Jean Clarke, a professor of entrepreneurship and organization at EmlyonBusiness School in France, has spent years watching entrepreneurs like GabrielHercule make their case at demo days, incubators, and investment forums acrossEurope. In a study published in 2019, she and her colleagues reported thatcompany founders who deployed “the skilled use of gesture” in their pitcheswere 12 percent more likely to attract funding for their new ventures.

      Researcher Jean Clarke's research (2019) indicates that entrepreneurs who employ "the skilled use of gesture" are 12 percent more likely to have their pitches funded than those who don't.

  20. Feb 2022
    1. The second reason might support positive change. The existence of tokens and decentralization means that it’s possible to build resilient open source communities where early contributors and supporters benefit handsomely over time. No one owns these communities, and we can hope that these communities will work hard to serve themselves and their users, not the capital markets or other short-term players.

      Capitalism's subject is Capital, not the bourgeoisie or an owner class. "Open source communities" are still corporations.

    1. at the very outset a sense of how the elements or “moments” (as Marx prefers to call them) of the capitalist economic system, such as production, labour, wages, profit, consumption, exchange, realization and distribution

      At the onset, if possible - - it would be preferable to have a clear understanding of what and how Marx would define the following three terms: 1. What is capital? 2. What is capitalism? 3. What is a capitalist economic system?

      The list of eight (8) elements or "moments" combined with the phrase "totality of what capital is all about". appears to be somewhat confusing. Did you mean to say what "capitalism is all about"? Or, does "capital" consists of a list of "things" as well as (at least one) process?

      And, are these 8 items all part of one single process - - called "capital" which is then transformed into different elements or "moments" as it circulates? Or, are there 8 separate interrelated processes?

  21. Dec 2021
    1. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence ofobjects – very often precious stones, shells or other items ofadornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Oftenthese were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would laterfind being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world.

      Is it also possible that these items may have served the purpose of mnemonic devices as a means of transporting (otherwise invisible) information from one area or culture to another?

      Can we build evidence for this from the archaeological record?

      Relate this to the idea of expanding the traditional "land, labor, capital" theory of economics to include "information" as a basic building block

  22. Nov 2021
    1. Chancel’s recent paper adds new insights by allocating national consumption emissions associated with capital investments to individuals within each country based on their share of asset ownership, derived from the latest wealth inequality datasets. He finds that emissions from investments make up an increasing share – up to 70% in 2019 – of the footprints of the world’s 1% highest emitters.32

      Hence, High Net Worth Individual Divestment (HNWID) is definitely an important future strategy.

  23. Sep 2021
    1. No one is going to be able to imagine a text online without annotations anymore.” They also foresaw a day when the site’s algorithmic evaluation of your Genius annotations — their “Genius IQ” — would be so widely accepted that it “could impact your grades in primary school and your ability to get a job in a certain field.” (“We’re going to have annotations on other sites, so every other site in the world like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are going be Genius-powered and they’re going to have our annotations on them. And then the Genius platform will take over the internet; everyone’s most important statistic that they have in life is their Genius IQ.”)

      Great example of the overly optimistic rose colored glasses of the venture fund backed tech elite. How do they still get away with such blatant failures? Who hold them socially and financially accountable?

    1. Derick Bedzra presented the eight forms of capital during one of our meetings with the Stop Reset Go team.

    1. “I think that everybody knows that we are in this incredible inflection point for humanity. And I think that what we don’t appreciate enough is that artists are the angel investors in the future that we want. They just have a different form of capital.”

      — Amanda Joy Ravenhill, Executive Director, Buckminster Fuller Institute

      (3:10:40)

      This quote connects to the Stop Reset Go meeting where Derick Bedzra walked us through the eight forms of capital.

  24. Aug 2021
  25. Jul 2021
    1. Well, no. I oppose capital punishment, just as (in my view) any ethical person should oppose capital punishment. Not because innocent people might be executed (though that is an entirely foreseeable consequence) but because, if we allow for capital punishment, then what makes murder wrong isn't the fact that you killed someone, it's that you killed someone without the proper paperwork. And I refuse to accept that it's morally acceptable to kill someone just because you've been given permission to do so.

      Most murders are system 1-based and spur-of-the-moment.

      System 2-based murders are even more deplorable because in most ethical systems it means the person actively spent time and planning to carry the murder out. The second category includes pre-meditated murder, murder-for-hire as well as all forms of capital punishment.

  26. Jun 2021
    1. Some argue that the American elite is functionally an old-fashioned aristocracy that owes its income to nepotism and opportunism. Others argue that the elite is functionally an oligarchy that owes its rising income to a shift away from labor and toward capital. According to this view, elites don’t even need nepotism — they are using preexisting wealth and inheritance to rebuild an old-fashioned feudal class.

      So much here to unpack...

    1. When people value their attention and energy, they become valuable

      Related to the idea of career capital, which is the set of knowledge and skills that makes you hard to replace.

  27. May 2021
    1. career capital

      You must first generate this capital by becoming good at something rare and valuable. It is something that makes you hard to replace and is therefore the result of putting effort into developing skills that differentiate you from others.

      Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (1 edition). Grand Central Publishing.

  28. Apr 2021
    1. Thus, the creative freedom of creators is limited.

      And thus draconian methods for making the distribution unnecessarily complicated, siloed, surveillance capitalized, and over-monitized beyond all comprehension are beyond the reach of one or two for profit companies who want to own the entire market like monopolistic giants are similarly limited. (But let's just stick with the creators we're pretending to champion, shall we?)

    1. I have a feeling some of the money framing in the newsletter space is overblown. Some bigger names with pre-existing platforms (and by this I mean exposure, popularity, voices, and other possible media outlets already) have some serious upside to creating paid newsletters. Many of these platforms are trying to not only capture a slice of these pies, they're trying to leverage those same big names to actively make it seem to the average person that they too could have a paid newsletter (see how easy it is...). The reality is that many of these others are going to spend a lot of time and effort to try to garner pennies on the dollar or ultimately fail. This sort of game works much better in the YouTube space where self-hosting the video and doing distribution is a much higher bar. The VC space for newsletters is going to have a dreadful crash when folks realize that there's more competition in the space than they bargained for.

  29. Mar 2021
    1. Bartscher, A. K., Seitz, S., Siegloch, S., Slotwinski, M., & Wehrhöfer, N. (2020). Social Capital and the Spread of COVID-19: Insights from European Countries. IZA Discussion Paper, 13310. Retrieved August 7, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13310/

    1. It’s the usual Silicon Valley sleight-of-hand move, very similar to Uber reps claiming drivers aren’t “core” to their business. I’m sure Substack is paying a writer right now to come up with a catchy way of saying that Substack doesn’t pay writers.
    2. So Substack has an editorial policy, but no accountability. And they have terms of service, but no enforcement.

      This is also the case for many other toxic online social media platforms. A fantastic framing.

    1. Alongside globalisation – the capitalist rationalisation of space and time – we are witnessing the epistemic and technical rationalisation of the neuronal foundations of the self, or what Walker Percy called the abstraction of the self from itself.

      We have reified a lot of implicit aspects of ourselves and it's hard to know what to do with this newfound knowledge. Right now this knowledge is subordinate to the machinery of capital but it doesn't have to be. This same understanding can be used for pro-social endeavors instead of making more and more money.

    2. Just as shift workers are sometimes given stimulants, so the point here was to adapt the innate neurobiological capacity of humans as a productive force to the technologies and rhythms of globalisation.

      More sinister vibes of the machinery of capital.

  30. Feb 2021
    1. 21st Century Economics (USA)

      Economic Theory of a Market Economy, Characteristics, Pros, and Cons

      Americans and the World believe or want to believe that the United States is built upon a Market Economy.

      Historical context validates a classic Market Economy theory as directed by our Founding Fathers and Constitution. We clearly do not have a pure Market Economy today (2021).

      • To Big to Fail - (Bailouts)
      • Farm Subsidies
      • Political Influence (money, lobbying, tenure)
      • Government Agencies
      • Military/Industrial Complex
      • Federal Reserve (Central Banking)
      • Social Security
      • Medicare
      • Other

      Most Americans lump (through education) the concept of economics and government together, into 3 basic categories; Capitalism, Socialism and Communism.

      The U.S. is a Capitalist Nation with a corresponding market economy.

      Is this statement Fact or Hypothesis ?

      Can we still rely on textbook economic models in the 21st Century?

    1. cultural capital

      Introduced by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s, the concept has been utilized across a wide spectrum of contemporary sociological research. Cultural capital refers to ‘knowledge’ or ‘skills’ in the broadest sense. Thus, on the production side, cultural capital consists of knowledge about comportment (e.g., what are considered to be the right kinds of professional dress and attitude) and knowledge associated with educational achievement (e.g., rhetorical ability). On the consumption side, cultural capital consists of capacities for discernment or ‘taste’, e.g., the ability to appreciate fine art or fine wine—here, in other words, cultural capital refers to ‘social status acquired through the ability to make cultural distinctions,’ to the ability to recognize and discriminate between the often-subtle categories and signifiers of a highly articulated cultural code. I'm quoting here from (and also heavily paraphrasing) Scott Lash, ‘Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural Economy and Social Change’, in this reader.

  31. Jan 2021
    1. one thing I’m dead certain of is that startups shouldn’t be fixing this for us.

      I love the picture that goes with this!

  32. Oct 2020
    1. The individual is helpless socially, if left by himself. Even the association of the members of one's own family fails to satisfied that desire which every normal individual has of being with his fellows, of being a part of a larger group than the family. If he comes into contact with his neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient for the substantial improvement of life in the whole community. The community as a whole will benefit by the cooperation of all its parts, while the individual will find in his associations the advantages of the help, the sympathy, and the fellowship of his neighbors. First, then, there must be an accumulation of community social capital. Such accumulation may be effected by means of public entertainments, picnics, and a variety of other community gatherings. When the people of a given community have become acquainted with one another and have formed a habit of coming together occasionally for entertainment, social intercourse, and personal enjoyment, then by skillful leadership this social capital may easily be directed towards the general improvement of the community well-being.
    1. queda rebajado 11 mercanda, a la más miserable de todas las mercancfas; que la mise!IÍa del obrero está en razón inversa de la potencia y magnjtud de su produc-ción; que el resultado necesario de la competencia es la acumulación del capital en pocas manos

      Con las mismas palabras de la economía política se ha demostrado que el trabajador queda rebajado a la más miserable de todas las mercancías; que la miseria del obrero está en razón inversa de la potencia y magnitud de su producción; que el resultado necesario de la competencia es la acumulación del capital en pocas manos.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. Think of this essay as a series of strongly held hypotheses; without access to the types of data which i’m not even sure exists, it’s difficult to be definitive. As ever, my wise readers will add or push back as they always do.

      Push back, sure, but where? Where would we find this push back? The comments section only has a few tidbits. Perhaps the rest is on Twitter, Facebook, or some other social silo where the conversation is fraught-fully fragmented. Your own social capital is thus spread out and not easily compiled or compounded. As a result I wonder who may or may not have read this piece...

    2. The same way many social networks track keystone metrics like time to X followers, they should track the ROI on posts for new users. It's likely a leading metric that governs retention or churn. It’s useful as an investor, or even as a curious onlooker to test a social networks by posting varied content from test accounts to gauge the efficiency and fairness of the distribution algorithm.
    3. Social capital is, in many ways, a leading indicator of financial capital, and so its nature bears greater scrutiny. Not only is it good investment or business practice, but analyzing social capital dynamics can help to explain all sorts of online behavior that would otherwise seem irrational.
    1. Mutual aid societies were built on the razed foundations of the old  guilds, and cooperatives and mass political parties then drew on the  experience of the mutual aid societies."

      This reminds me of the beginning of the Civil Rights movement that grew out of the civic glue that arose out of prior work relating to rape cases several years prior.

      I recall Zeynep Tufekci writing a bit about some of these tangential ideas in some of her social network writing. (Where's the link to that?)

  33. Aug 2020
  34. Jul 2020
    1. Howell, S. T., Lerner, J., Nanda, R., & Townsend, R. R. (2020). Financial Distancing: How Venture Capital Follows the Economy Down and Curtails Innovation (Working Paper No. 27150; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27150

  35. Apr 2020
    1. Johnson’s book (lively and well sourced –  highly recommended) transcends the cliche of the individual innovator  and shows the ways in which innovation depends on a form of social  capital — the networks of people and ideas that innovators learn from  and build upon.

      It's rarely ever about the "lone genius".

    1. When Casper filed its S-1 in January, analysts, investors, and business nerds descended on the document like vultures. Not only was it a precarious moment to take a startup public, it was the first time anyone could actually access the raw numbers under the hood of a DTC. “The economics work better if Casper sent you a mattress for free, stuffed with $300,” jabbed NYU Stern marketing professor and tech doomsayer Scott Galloway. “This appears to be Casper’s business,” tweeted number-crunching Atlantic columnist Derek Thompson. “Buy mattress at $400. Sell at $1,000. Refund/return 20% of them. Keep $400, on avg. Then spend $290 of that on ads/marketing and $270 on admin (finance, HR, IT). Lose $160. Repeat.”

      Summary of Casper's business model

    2. Months after achieving unicorn status by raising $100 million in funding at a $1.4 billion valuation, The Verge detailed allegations against the Instagrammy startup that its CEO Steph Korey had created a sweatshop culture within the company.

      Sadly this seems to be the finance model of a lot of these venture-based startups. They're squeezing their employees as a means of making their numbers.

    3. Perhaps the original mistake of the DTCs wasn’t in their vision, but in their decision to take the venture capital in the first place. Now under pressure to grow even faster and at greater scale than they otherwise would have had to naturally, they are being confronted with what happens when growth slows down, the cash starts running out, and investors are expecting their returns.
    4. the past few months have exposed major cracks in the DTC business model, as several high-profile, venture-backed DTC startups have struggled and others have completely closed their doors. The investors bankrolling these companies are discovering one thing in common — that most of their money is going to expensive and ever-rising customer acquisition costs (CAC) via Google, Facebook, and Instagram. As one DTC investor has put it starkly before: “CAC is the new rent.”

      Roughly what I had anticipated in back of the envelope calculations about 4 years ago. And this not to mention the voraciousness of venture capital as a bigger issues in and of itself.

  36. Feb 2020
    1. Capital is money: Capital is commodities.

      Capital equals self-valorizing value. The "self" relates to labor-power qua capital purchased by the capitalist realized in the process of production. Therefore, "capital is money capital is commodities," as it uses, realizes, and incorporates money and the commodity of labor.

  37. Dec 2019
    1. Made in China 2025, Beijing has designs to dominate cutting-edge technologies like advanced microchips, artificial intelligence and electric cars, among many others, in a decade
  38. Aug 2019
    1. Para responder a esta problemática se ha promovido un modelo educativo que desarrolle competencias profesionales.

      Primero se consideran a las competencias como una problemáticas

  39. Jul 2019
    1. Another prominent conclusion is that joint asset ownership is suboptimal if investments are in human capital.

      Does that have to be the case?

  40. Jun 2019
    1. capital

      is a sum of money provided to a company to further its business objectives. The term also can refer to a company's acquisition of long-term assets such as real estate, manufacturing plants, and machinery.

  41. Apr 2019
    1. That so much social capital for the young comes in the form of followers, likes, and comments from peers and strangers shouldn't lessen its value.
    2. Maintenance of existing social capital stores is often a more efficient use of time than fighting to earn more on a new social network given the ease of just earning interest on your sizeable status reserves. That's just math, especially once you factor in loss aversion.
    3. Most of these near clones have and will fail. The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.

      This presumes that status is the only reason why people would join such a network. It also underlines the fact that the platform needs to be easy and simple to use, otherwise no one enters it and uses it as the tool first before the network exists.

    4. graph-based social capital allocation mechanisms can suffer from runaway winner-take-all effects. In essence, some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they've earned it through the quality of their posts. One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can't be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game.
    5. I can still remember posting the same photos to Flickr and Instagram for a while and seeing how quickly the latter passed the former in feedback. If I were an investor or even an employee, I might have something like a representative basket of content that I'd post from various test accounts on different social media networks just to track social capital interest rates and liquidity among the various services.
    6. It's true that as more people join a network, more social capital is up for grabs in the aggregate. However, in general, if you come to a social network later, unless you bring incredible exogenous social capital (Taylor Swift can join any social network on the planet and collect a massive following immediately), the competition for attention is going to be more intense than it was in the beginning. Everyone has more of an understanding of how the game works so the competition is stiffer.

      Perhaps the IndieWeb is growing at such a much slower rate (in this thesis, there is a much higher level for "proof of work") that this sort of social capital is more akin to that of social capital in real life? Some of the value of IndieWeb is that all your "social capital" can be put in one place and better controlled by you.

      Why would one want to game their own sites in these ways? Are personal sites a better reflection of real life social capital? There's also lost personal time in learning and participating in dozens of social silos which is much better spent creating things of greater consequence.

      With respect to his mention of Paul Krugman's Instagram account, it's useful to be able to pick and choose what you might want to follow in Paul's life. If you're a close friend then his Instagram account is awesome, but if you're a young political science student then his bookmarks, reads, notes, and articles would be much more valuable to you.

    7. [An aside about exogenous social capital: you might complain that your tweets are more interesting and grammatical than those of, say, Donald Trump (you're probably right!). Or that your photos are better composed and more interesting at a deep level of photographic craft than those of Kim Kardashian. The difference is, they bring a massive supply of exogenous pre-existing social capital from another status game, the fame game, to every table, and some forms of social capital transfer quite well across platforms. Generalized fame is one of them. More specific forms of fame or talent might not retain their value as easily: you might follow Paul Krugman on Twitter, for example, but not have any interest in his Instagram account. I don't know if he has one, but I probably wouldn't follow it if he did, sorry Paul, it’s nothing personal.]

      In publishing circles, this has long been known as platform or author platform--ie that thing that made you famous in the first place that gives you the space to attempt to try to use that fame to sell books.

    8. While you can outsource Bitcoin mining to a computer, people still mine for social capital on social networks largely through their own blood, sweat, and tears.

      The other portion of the problem is then turning this social capital into actual money. This gives way to the rise of influencers.

    9. The creation of a successful status game is so mysterious that it often smacks of alchemy. For that reason, entrepreneurs who succeed in this space are thought of us a sort of shaman, perhaps because most investors are middle-aged white men who are already so high status they haven't the first idea why people would seek virtual status
    1. THIS   SERIESA   PREFERRED   STOCK   PURCHASE   AGREEMENT

      Hi Craig-- here's a public note to you that any one else could see-- but we could also create a private group here and have a conversation just between ourselves and others.

  42. Mar 2019
    1. Understanding Monetary Premiums in Programmable Value Networks

      The TLDR is: Zuller proposes that social capital and financial capital form a virtuous circle for cryptonetworks, allowing first movers such as ethereum to gain a decisive advantage against competitors. Ethereum's accumulated social and financial capital make it difficult for a challenger to emerge as a general-purpose decentralised smart contract platform.

      My thought is Zuller's analysis of social capital ignores the long established body of work on on the topic, and this analysis could be better applied in the case of ethereum. I also think bitcoin is an interesting study in the effects of social capital and the viability of a decentral crypto network.

    2. DFINITY, Near, Polkadot

      These projects are all funded or founded by individuals with significant social and financial capital. They are therefore well positioned to challenge ethereum's dominance.

      By contrast, consider Satoshi Nakamoto's launch of the bitcoin network. As a pseudonymous persona with no history attached to it, Nakamoto had no social capital to speak of. This social capital had to be bootstrapped through a corpus of communications on the cryptography mailing list, and other fora.

      So bitcoin was launched with minimal social capital, by contrast to ethereum.

  43. Feb 2019
    1. the melancholy mournings of the turtle,

      gilmanhernandez already linked to the video I was considering, but (according to a cursory search of YouTube at least) videos of turtle sounds are also likely to be videos of turtles mating or attempting to mate, so how 'mournful' they are is perhaps up to interpretation... 😂

    1. he names of simple ideas tlie least doubtful. c8. Fr

      So, Locke is trying to establish somewhat of a hierarchy of language based in clarity. Names of simple substances are closest to the Truth of the substance. "Philosophical" words are furthest from Truth because what the concepts/things they represent are most difficult to nail down. I wonder, then, if we can translate this to exploring the human--do we have a hierarchy of understanding? Or a hierarchy of Truest representation?

    2. no-body having an authority to establish the precise signification of words,

      While Locke seems to favor the capital T Truth, he here says that nobody is the authority on it.

    3. certain and undoubted

      "Certain and undoubted" brings to mind the classical sense of logos, where it's meaning isn't logic or reasoning (as we tend to think of it now) but is more about the commonly accepted truth. It's a truth that people believe--but that doesn't make it correct. Locke undoubtedly is not intending this meaning but is instead calling for an objective Truth.

    4. nonrelativistic view of knowledge.

      Objective knowledge of Truth

    5. incomplete or inaccurate idea

      Incomplete or inaccurate according to whom? Some objective Truth?

    1. Among athousand different opinions which different menmay entenain of the same subject, there is one,and but one, that is just and true;

      Aaaand there we have it, the rejection of relativism that was also in Locke. "Come, John! There is one Truth and we must seek it out!"

    1. indb-•i' putablc truth

      The belief in capital T truth strikes again. For the Greeks, search for Truth was under the purview of the philosophers; here, it's sought by practitioners of science. Interesting parallels between scientists and philosophers.

  44. Jan 2019
    1. nature—as opposed to cul-ture—is ahistorical and timeless?

      Doreen Massey has an interesting book that touches on this (Space, Place, and Gender), where she points out that time and space are treated as binaries, where time is typically masculine and dynamic and space is feminine and static. Nature (gendered feminine) is spatial, a place, and therefore not a time ("ahistorical and timeless"). Culture, on the other hand, is temporal, dynamic, masculine. It's a very particular rhetoric which begs the "which one?" question.

      (While Massey points out this common way of conceiving of time/space and binaries in general [A vs. Not A], she argues that the concept of space needs to be defined on its own merit, distinct from its binary opposite.)

    1. ra in which moneymight be dubbed the foremost rhetorical proof. In

      Ethos, Logos, Pathos, Numus($)

    2. nonsignifying symbolic economy that simultaneously turns on andproduces logics of desire

      How does this work in tension with what was said earlier about the simulacra not making the real more malleable? It seems like just the opposite is being argued here; that the simulacrum (capital) is turning its own megaphone louder and louder, "changing" the real by "produc[ing] logics of desire."

    3. capitalis

      mholder, I take it back. It's about both.

    4. , resentment toward capit

      This strikes me as a remarkably dehistoricized and depolticized reading of what actually constitutes "leftist" critiques of capital. Nealon also seems to be articulating Jameson's concept of "cognitive mapping," but Mucklebauer and Hawhee have already dismissed him (I mean, I haven't actually read Nealon's piece, so I could be way off). I'm just pissy now.

    5. ut cap

      Are they making a distinction between capital (money) and capitalism (an ideology/economic system)?

    1. where no clear 1ruth was availahlc

      When there's no Truth (in subjective situations), rhetoric comes to the rescue.

    1. truth and Truth,
    2. prove

      Interesting that there's this call for "proof," some form of evidence, something tangible that we can point to. Such a desire feels very objective, as though there's some Truth this proof will point to. What would such proofs be?

  45. Nov 2018
    1. ​BUT, our students will not (most) have the economic, cultural, historical provenances nor intention ... the reality of community college students is that most will not produce academic discourse but will eak through multiple courses with minimum academic writing (and if so, poorly) while they will continue their certain continued marginalized communities that are, per Bourdieu, decapitalized (lacking cultural capital)​, whereas critical rhetoric could address these systemics inegalitarianism.

  46. Sep 2018
    1. Ontario’s postsecondary institutions play an important role in equipping students with the skills, knowledge and competencies required to succeed in a rapidly changing social, economic and technological world. Ensuring that postsecondary institutions across the province are equipped with the right space and technology is important to delivering quality higher education. To support this, the Province will provide more than $3 billion in capital grants to postsecondary institutions over the next 10 years.

      3 billion

  47. Aug 2018
    1. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that social capital and social institutions are significant predictors of economic growth, after controlling for the effects of human capital and initial levels of income (Knack and Keefer 1997), (Knack 2002).4 So trust is a relevant dimension of social interactions that has been connected to individual dyads, network formation, labor markets, and even economic growth.
  48. Jun 2018
    1. We favor spreading priceand risk by building up and averaging out of positions over time rather than speculating onspeculation. A committed capital structure with significant capital reserves for staged follow-onsgives us the flexibility to build up our investments independent of market sentiment. We areshielded from having to dump assets on the market to honor redemption requests, avoiding thedreaded “death spiral” which can plague more liquid fund structures.
    2. We fund the development of decentralized information networks coordinated by a scarcecryptoasset – or token – native to the protocol. Our thesis is that decentralization andstandardization at the data layer of the internet is collapsing the production costs of informationnetworks, eliminating data monopolies and creating a new wave of innovation.
  49. Sep 2017
    1. , it would, but because their networks do not often cross, the gap between social connectedness of the rich and the poor continues to grow

      Yes! This is the cost of geographical, educational and social marginalization. Different economic groups travel in different circles which reproduces their current economic position.

    2. social capital offline only helps those who currently have high levels of economic and symbolic capital.

      Again, I think the theoretical point behind social capital is that all relationships can have some value but it is also to show how some connections have more value than others. Certainly, knowing your neighbor or sharing stories with the clerk at the 7-11 is helpful to those how live in poverty. But, for those who are born at the top, they know the head of the corporations so the pay off is bigger. Both pay off but one pays off more.

    3. social ties, is a significant reason. His children, by no virtue of their own but solely because of their social ties with him, are also in positions of high power and prestige and have astronomical amounts of money.

      I am not sure this is the best example of social capital in that these are family relationships not social relationships. I think the idea of social capital is to show that other relationships beyond family or blood have value.

    1. remote connections comprise a social network that offers a degree of social capital without some of the demands that go along with social networks in closer quarters.

      What are the benefits of this? In terms of cost/benefit, if these ties pay off just as well as in person ties without the expending of as much time and labor, is that a net positive? Or is something lost in the ease of contact? Again, what does data say?

    1. encourage students to activate their ties

      Are these students building social capital? Do these ties follow them outside the class? Do they draw on these ties for other purposes?

    1. How would their analysis of social networks and social capital change if they were here today?

      This is a new line of research and theory!!