6 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2023
    1. “Don’t you ever think about the future?” I challenged him.“No,” Muthu said. “There’s enough to worry about every daywithout worrying about tomorrow.”

      competing over saving and spending

  2. Apr 2023
    1. I reject both pure Rousseau-ism, i.e. humans would be good and equal if not for unequal structures, and Hobbesian-ism, i.e. people are bad and are only kept good by forceful institutions. What matters most I believe, is the right balance between cooperation and competition, both are real, at the individual and collective level, and we as humans are a mixed and complex bag.
      • Michel begins the essay by doing away with simple, absolute assumptions about society.
        • We are each and collectively a mixture of
          • cooperative and
          • competitive tendencies
      • This echoes the evolutionary description of an individual as a distinct living system that is demarcated from its environment so is
        • in competition with other individuals for resources in order to survive as an individual organism
        • at the same time that it cooperates with other types of individuals that can enhance its individual and collective (species) survival
      • In other words
        • competition and collaboration are often entangled phenotypes necessary for evolutionary fitness
  3. Nov 2017
    1. And I see no good reason why we should require the production of educators and students to be fair game for resellers who want to pluck it for free out of the commons and charge money for it to those not lucky enough to be a part of our community.

      To many a student, the notion that somebody else could profit from their “free labour” is particularly offputting. Including (or especially) those who prepare to become the heads of commercial entities.

    1. Publishers can compete with free textbooks by making their more-restrictive-than-all-right-reserved offerings 70% more affordable.

      Sounds a bit like what Clay Shirky was trying to say about the Napster moment coming to Higher Education, five years ago. Skimmed the critique of Shirky’s piece and was mostly nodding in agreement with it. But there might be a discussion about industries having learnt from the Napster moment. After all, the recording industry has been able to withstand this pressure for close to twenty years. Also sounds like this could be a corollary to Chris Anderson’s (in)famous promotion of the “free” (as in profit) model for businesses, almost ten years ago. In other words, we might live another reshaping of “free” in the next 9-10 years.

  4. Sep 2017