Free market family

Have you ever heard of a family that ran well without any bureaucracy and without any formal regulations? Of course you have, and that because the social group is small and all members are well-acquainted with each other. The group is kept in check as a result of a top-down power structure under the control of the parents. The family is also guided by well-understood customs and habits, by kin selection and by reciprocal altruism. No surprise here, that families don’t need formal rules and regulations. How about a corporation, though? Have you ever heard of a successful large corporation that had no need for formal rules and regulations? I haven’t. These organizations are much bigger than families, of course. There is little biological relatedness and they lack most of the other “natural” regulation that families have. They are held in check thanks to numerous rules and regulations, many of them published in the corporation’s manuals filled with policies and procedures. Now think about an entire country. How is it that so many conservatives insist that a country can run well without rules and regulations? How can they insist that the fewer rules, the better a country will run? On what do they base this? On countries without rules and regulations, such as Somalia or Haiti? We have test cases called corporations that absolutely need formal regulations, yet free market fundamentalists insist that entire countries, which are much larger, much more complex, and rife with conflicting interest groups, will simply run by themselves, without planning or structure. I don’t get it. Just because many rules and regulations don’t make sense, you don’t through out rules all together. Large organizations need smart rules. They need rules that work. There is no example otherwise. How can this possibly be controversial?

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What are gamers getting good at?

Game designer Jane McGonigal points out the immense numbers of hours gamers are spending getting good at what they do. World of Warcraft players typically spent 22 hours per week playing that game. What are they getting good at, based upon all of that investment? At what are they becoming virtuosos? McGonigal offers four answers. a. Urgent optimism; b. Weaving a tight social fabric; c. Blissful Productivity d. Epic meaning. Gamers, per McGonigal, are "Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals." They are convinced that they are excellent at changing the world, and they are good at getting things done, but it is only in their cyber-worlds. They are gaming to escape the dysfunctional real world. What's McGonigal's solution? To make the real world more like a game-world--she argues that gamers are a valuable resource that we need to tap into. We are ready to start an "epic game" where we remake the future. Her games include the following invitations to change one's world: A) World without oil - learning to live in a world of Peak Oil. B) Superstruct - Learning to survive global extinction. C) Evoke - Learning to teach social innovation skills to aid stressed societies.

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About Huffington Post

I get much of my news from Huffington Post. It has been an excellent source for Wall Street corruption, even if those good links come at the price of also getting a steady diet of woo "medicine" and Hollywood gossip. All in all, though, Huffpo has been a steady provider of valuable information. Let me back up: Arianna Huffington has also offered some excellent advice, such as her campaign that we should all get a lot more sleep. When I first heard today's news that AOL has bought the Huffington Post, I was disappointed. That was my honest gut feeling. It immediately occurred to me that AOL will now insist that Huffpo needs to produce significantly more revenue at the expense of progressive commentary. I suspect that that there will be new political pressures to hold back stories inconvenient to the bottom line. Thus I'm not celebrating. But I also know that Arianna Huffington has long been interested in cranking out serious investigative journalism, and I know that it takes money to do this well. I'm still not celebrating. I'm apprehensive. According to John Nichols of The Nation, though, it is not necessarily time to mourn.

If, with AOL’s resources, she is able to hire more, if she and her team are able to produce more serious content and if they can identify some of those “different ways to save investigative journalism,” it is possible to imagine that the AOL–Huffington Post deal could mark a turning point in the debate about the future of journalism. That’s a lot of “ifs…”
The bottom line, then, is that time will tell . . .

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Confronting climate cranks

Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation is offering some reasons for stepping up and confronting climate denialists:

"You want specifics? By the time she is my age, [my daughter] Chiara may well not have enough water to drink here in California, because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack will have melted. Children in today's Washington, DC, are likely to witness in the course of their lifetimes sea level rise combine with stronger storm surges to regularly ring the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials with moats and submerge half of the National Mall. By 2050 the record heat that made the summer of 2010 so wicked will become the new normal in New York City and much of the East Coast. Overseas, the impacts will be punishing as well, especially for the poor. In Bangladesh, sea level rise is already making the soil and water in southern coastal regions too salty to produce decent yields of rice, the staple crop for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, the inexorability of sea level rise ensures that many such low-lying areas worldwide will have to be evacuated, unleashing vast streams of climate change refugees. Military experts warn that this will pose not only humanitarian challenges but recurring threats to peace if the refugees attempt to cross national borders."
An important step in the process is to avoid referring to climate cranks as "skeptics."
Don't rely on our media to rise to the occasion. The protocol of mainstream news coverage leads Washington journalists to refer to these people as climate skeptics. They're not skeptics. They're cranks. True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that it's all a left-wing plot.

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