NYSee Radar

Tag: economics

  • The pessimist who became a prophet

    The pessimist who became a prophet

    Martin Sandbu · FT Magazine

    Michael Sandel was ignored by a generation of political optimists. Now he is searching for a way out of the mess he saw coming

    “One way of seeing how a toleration of avoidance leads to conflict is that when we give up on engaging with moral disagreements . . . we create a moral void at the heart of public discourse.” That, in his view, has been the cost of the politics we have seen since the 1990s. “Democratic citizens can’t abide for long a public discourse empty of larger moral meaning.” Sooner or later that void would have to be filled by “narrow, intolerant, dangerous moralisms of two kinds: religious fundamentalism or hypernationalism. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen.”

    FT Gift Link

  • ‘pain point’ : the maximum amount you are willing to pay

    ‘pain point’ : the maximum amount you are willing to pay

    Noah Giansiracusa · Harvard Law Today

    Retailers are looking for what’s called the “pain point.” That’s the maximum amount that you as an individual customer are willing to pay for a specific product
    …
    [an app’s] knowledge of your phone battery’s life to determine how desperate you might be for a ride home, and therefore charge you more for it
    …
    now imagine … they look at me and they know every video I’ve watched on YouTube, everything I’ve searched in Google, and everything I have liked on Facebook, every conversation I’ve had with an AI chatbot. Does that feel like a fair situation?

    Does that feel like a fair situation?

    The wage slaves of the Gilded Age had it easy

  • 39C3 – A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet

    Cory Doctorow · 39C3

    Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning “adversarial interoperability,” America handcuffed the world’s technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech.

    Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it’s time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world’s hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!

    We’re very much aware of Cory’s Enshittification concept. With everyone up to speed in this audience he’s able to chart the path out with the people who will take us there.