February 10,
I’ve updated my footer so the copyright dates include 2021. I’ve also updated the Webmention button so that it now points at my standalone endpoint for those who may not see or want to use the input box on individual posts. Finally I modified the text that appears on both the standalone endpoint as well as the individual post boxes on each post so that the same text works to properly describe both cases.
I also spent some time trying to fix my fragmention/fragmentioner, but I’m not quite there yet.
Finished chapter one. I like that this text has so many linked resources, but some of the links to the sister texts make me think I’d be getting a deeper and more technical understanding by reading them instead of this more introductory text. Still, this has some tremendous value even as a refresher.
Annotations from Unit 1 Capitalism and democracy: Affluence, inequality, and the environment
Government bodies also tend to be more limited in their capacity to expand if successful, and are usually protected from failure if they perform poorly. ❧
They can expand in different ways however. Think about the expansion of empires of Egypt, Rome, and the Mongols in the 12th Century. What caused them to cease growing and decrease? What allowed them to keep increasing?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:50PM
Capitalism is an economic system that can combine centralization with decentralization. ❧
How can we analogize this with the decentralization of the web and its economy?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:50PM
Market competition provides a mechanism for weeding out those who underperform. ❧
Note how this has failed in the current guilded age of the United States where it is possible for things to be “too big to fail”.
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:50PM
First, because capital goods do not fall from the sky: all countries that have successfully moved from poverty to affluence have done so, of necessity, by accumulating large amounts of capital. We will also see that a crucial feature of capitalism is who owns and controls the capital goods in an economy. ❧
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 03:11PM
Yet some things that we value are not private property—for example, the air we breathe and most of the knowledge we use cannot be owned, bought, or sold. ❧
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:49PM
We should be sceptical when anyone claims that something complex (capitalism) ‘causes’ something else (increased living standards, technological improvement, a networked world, or environmental challenges), just because we can see there is a correlation. ❧
Great and ridiculous examples of this can be found at https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 08:59PM
Figure 1.16 ❧
Note the dramatic inconsistency of the scale on the left hand side. What is going on here?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:23PM
Firms should not be owned and managed by people who survive because of their connections to government or their privileged birth: Capitalism is dynamic when owners or managers succeed because they are good at delivering high-quality goods and services at a competitive price. This is more likely to be a failure when the other two factors above are not working well. ❧
Here is where we’re likely to fail in the United States by following the example of Donald Trump, who ostensibly has survived solely off the wealth of his father’s dwindling empire. With that empire gone, he’s now turning to creating wealth by associating with the government. We should carefully follow where this potentially leads the country.
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:31PM
In some, their spending on goods and services as well as on transfers like unemployment benefits and pensions, accounts for more than half of GDP. ❧
What is the Government’s proportion of the US GDP presently?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:34PM
James Bronterre O’Brien, told the people:‘Knaves will tell you that it is because you have no property, you are unrepresented. I tell you on the contrary, it is because you are unrepresented that you have no property …’ ❧
great quote
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:53PM
Yet some things that we value are not private property—for example, the air we breathe and most of the knowledge we use cannot be owned, bought, or sold. ❧
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:49PM
Thomas Piketty, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and bestselling author of Capital in the 21st Century, tells The CORE Project (http://core-econ.org) how he "tries to be useful" by collecting long-run data into the distribution of wealth - and what it tells us about the effects of wealth inequality on society.
Our voting system is a little different because we respect your privacy.
If you build websites, you inevitably run into problems. We want to hear about it!
I’m happy to announce that we have 3 short keynotes planned for the first morning of IndieWebCamp Austin! After coffee and breakfast tacos, we’ll get the day started with an introduction to the schedule and our featured speakers. Natalie Hester — Natalie keeps a gratitude journal on Micro.blo...
Can’t wait to see what you do with it next.
How do I get setup on the IndieWeb?



Much of what passes as educational technology are corporate products designed for purposes of profit-seeking, surveillance, data collection, and user lock-in. Other kinds of technology exist, but they typically lack the marketing and sales budgets of competing vendors. Ethical EdTech is an online community that shares tools and techniques to facilitate pedagogy that puts participants... Read More
Extra Feeds Plugin for WordPress
For individual posts, the Extra Feeds plugin will add code into the <header>
of one’s page to provide feed readers that have built-in discovery mechanisms the ability to find the additional feeds provided by WordPress for all the tags, categories, and other custom taxonomies that appear on any given page.
Without the plugin, WordPress core will generally only provide the main feed for your site and that of your comments feed. This is fine for sites that only post a few times a day or even per week. If you’re owning more of the content you post online on your own website as part of the IndieWeb or Domain of One’s Own movements, you’ll likely want more control for the benefit of your readers.
In reality WordPress provides feeds for every tag, category, or custom taxonomy that appears on your site, it just doesn’t advertise them to feed readers or other machines unless you add them manually or via custom code or a plugin. Having this as an option can be helpful when you’re publishing dozens of posts a day and your potential readers may only want a subsection of your posting output.
In my case I have a handful of taxonomies that post hundreds to thousands of items per year, so it’s more likely someone may want a subsection of my content rather than my firehose. In fact, I just ran across a statistician yesterday who was following just my math and information theory/biology related posts. With over 7,000 individual taxonomy entries on my site you’ve got a lot of choice, so happy hunting and reading!
This plugin also includes feeds for Post Formats, Post Kinds (if you have that plugin installed), and the author feed for sites with one or more different authors.
This is useful in that now while you’re on any particular page and want to subscribe to something on that specific page, it will be much easier to find those feeds, which have always been there, but are just not easily uncovered by many feed reader work flows because they weren’t explicitly declared.
Some examples from a recent listen post on my site now let you more easily find and subscribe to:
- my faux-cast:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » listen Kind Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/rss/" />
- the feed of items tagged with Econ Extra Credit, which I’m using to track my progress in Marketplace’s virtual book club:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Econ Extra Credit Tag Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/tag/econ-extra-credit/feed/rss/" />
- the feed for all posts by an author:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Posts by Chris Aldrich Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/author/chrisaldrich/feed/rss/" />

The least excruciating compromise between 1) irreproducible science, and 2) spooking your luddite colleagues
Minimising the friction of advertising my thoughts in order to maximise the chance a clever thought gets advertised.
📺 “Meet the Press” February 10, 2018 | NBC
Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Katy Tur, David Brody, Kimberly Atkins and Markos Moulitsas