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Via Duck Soup, we’re served a nice demystification of a free market fairy tale—that of preference and predatory capitalism. It’s well established that once a chain operation moves into a market, if local, established businesses cannot compete, they’ll eventually be edged out by dint of inefficiencies and although the community may mourn the loss of one of its anchors, customers will ultimately be better served by the franchise.
It’s a bit of cold comfort and consolation but what it relies on illusion preference (the symbols above are shorthand in that field of study for equivalence and strong preference) that predicates the narrative on flattening out all companies as entrepreneurs running lemonade stands—which is vastly far off from the case of a local shop competing with a multinational corporation. This scenario reminds me of monopsony—the big company will necessarily enjoy much larger margins for profit because it has great purchasing power for supplies, advertising and even recruiting labour. The big corporation does not even necessarily need to undercut the competition, charging the same or even more for a comparable good or service or attract and retain loyal patrons, but magnitude will eventually prevail—that is, until people and governments are disabused of the myth of the Invisible Hand that belies its appeal.

miscellany

Oxford Words guest blogger Elyse Graham gifts us with a name for the phenomenon that coincided and defined the transition from the early internet into the period called the Web 2.0 when the rise of social media platforms made going online interactive—for virtually all whereas it was the bailiwick of a few companies and caretakers previously—and not just something to be read or watched: folksonomy.
Information theorist Thomas Vander Wal coined the idea in 2004 for the informal systems of curation and classification (a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy) that were being developed through labels and hashtags. Whereas thanks to advances in search engine indexing, visiting websites and bookmarking websites could be an uncategorised activity (Everything is Miscellaneous was a 2007 book on the power of the digital disorder and the lack of an authoritative card catalogue), sharing seems to need a tag of some sort—even if it’s made conspicuous by its absence. Folksonomies have moved beyond being a utilitarian tool for grouping and information retrieval and have taken on a life of their own as stage whispers and theatrical asides, revelling more in their unhelpful, for the nonce specificity rather than defining broader genre and genus.

stochastic terrorism

Before virtue signalling, red-pills and dog-whistles, someone formulated the title term, borrowing from the discipline of mathematics and control theory that describes something randomly determined, to define the use of mass-communication as a means of rabble-rousing and provoking violence that fall within the statistical tolerances of what we’ve come to accept as unsurprising but each incident is in isolation itself unpredictable and unexpected.
We know the drill.  We know that the words of demagogues have the power to agitate, and we deputise and acknowledge that tragic outcomes—though avoidable—are inevitable.  We are then left to deal with the consequences of those emboldened and benighted whose cult-leaders by this act of tribute are kept beyond reproach and responsibility.

merkeldämmerung

A lot of the reasoned decisions that Angela Merkel has made during her leadership, spanning thirteen years thus far, have been characterised as reactionary when in fact they were very much premeditated, like the Engeriewende, mothballing nuclear power plants, that seemed to happen in the wake of the Fukushima disaster whose phasing-out was planned for a long time, or the choice to open the borders to asylum-seekers after not publically promising a young refugee that there was definitely a place for her and her family when the deliberation was measured and many were consulted.
Merkel’s announcement not to seek re-election was strongly hinted at in the summer, though the nature of her future plans were not fully limned out—that she would be retiring from politics altogether (those there’s always the chance for a much-deserved encore) and relinquish party-leadership while staying on through her term.  What do you think?  Endorsing no particular successor and vowing to bow out earlier should snap-, off-cycle-elections be called, Merkel hopes her departure and concession of an inflection point will help restore civility to a polarised and fractious constituency, which was marked by years of partnership and outreach with other factions.

the yellow emperor’s inner canon

I first heard about this provocative project a week ago or so when the individual behind it Kuang-yi Ku got an honourable mention at Dutch Design Week for his thought-experiment but thought the gross-out factor was a bit too high—and while the images are still disturbing, Project Tiger Penis, drawing on emerging advances in the biomedical sciences and the ability to grow, print meat in the laboratory to produce authentic substitutes for articles of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Zhōngyī, 中医) did seem to resonate as a way of protecting endangered fauna and flora that are often tortured or poached for their ingredients, whose pharmacological merits are sometimes a matter of dispute.
It becomes even more relatable, I think, given the context that some religious figures have expressed a willingness to deem artificial meats in general and lab-sourced pork specifically as kosher or halal. What do you think? While reserving qualms for putting energy and efforts into making exotic potions might seem reasonable to non-practitioners at first blush (especially when examining it in isolation and outside of the customs that inform it), it behoves us to reason out that it’s presently highly questionable what good we derive from eating animals to begin with, while so many of us do as a matter of upbringing.  Without considering the impact and consequence of appetites for a moment, taste and choice are different than what can be subjected to science but one approach and way of thinking ought not to be privileged above the other because neither has found the panacea or cure for ageing.