STS (Science and Technology Studies) and Neoliberal Science
by Rebecca Lave, Philip Mirowski and Samuel Randalls
(https://www.academia.edu/7999084/Neoliberal_science and
http://sss.sagepub.com/content/40/5/659):

In this special issue, we focus on the particular impacts of neoliberalism as a regime of scientific management. Drawing on a wide range of studies from other fields, as well as the four cases in this issue, we argue that while there are important differences in how neoliberalism has been implemented across nations and disciplines, there are a set of key principles and common outcomes that can serve a heuristic function for STS scholars attempting a more careful examination of neoliberalism. These common outcomes include: the rollback of public funding for universities; the separation of research and teaching missions, leading to rising numbers of temporary faculty; the dissolution of the scientific author; the narrowing of research agendas to focus on the needs of commercial actors; an increasing reliance on market take-up to adjudicate intellectual disputes; and the intense fortification of intellectual property in an attempt to commercialize knowledge, impeding the production and dissemination of science. Taken together, these shifts suggest that the impact of neoliberal science policy and management extends far beyond the patent system into the methods, organization, and content of science. We thus urge STS scholars to undertake a detailed exploration of exactly how the external political—economic forces of neoliberalism are transforming technoscience.

Keywords: commercialization, neoliberalism, political economy, privatization

Choosing pen drives (with flash memory) for external operating systems:

• Hama Valeus FlashPen 64GB Speicherstick (150Mbps, USB 3.0). It’s a “LaCie RuggedKey” drive. I use it for an external Linux.

 
Not really suitable for external OS:

• Sony 64 GB MicroVault Entry USB3.0 Pendrive [USM-64X/W], “up to 110 MB/s” reading speed: Slow writing. Perhaps the original partinioning is optimized for that drive. I didn’t test it with the original partition. Reformatting (as required e.g. for Linux) may not be recommended. As for NTFS, writing is very slow, but works.
• I installed Linuxmint on a 64G SanDisk “Extreme USB 3.0″. It boots on an old EeePC 901, but not on a Lenovo 205. (2015-10-14)

http://blowingupbits.com/2015/01/an-outsiders-perspective-on-windows-10-preview/

Just for fun: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/366410119658210356/

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/30/class-war-is-back-again

[...] unlike the disputed one at the centre of the libel case Andrew Mitchell has just lost. At issue there was whether or not he had called a policeman a “fucking pleb”. Although few us would feel confident about swearing at a policeman, that wasn’t the problem. It was the “pleb” that did for Mitchell.

Had he been accused of calling him an “fucking plod”, he’d probably still have a political career [...]

Actually, the class war never disappeared, but now it is clearly visible again.

M. C. Escher’s art never really exited me. But it inspired many artists. As a kind of bycatch of my Snark hunt, I found that also Escher himself was open to inspiration from other artists.

[left] Maurits Cornelis Escher: Cimino Barbarano, 1929 (in Escher’s “Italian” period). This reproduction of the original print has been horizontally compressed and segments on the right side and of the left side of the image have been removed.
[right] John Martin: The Bard, ca. 1817, converted to grey shading, segments on the top and the bottom of the image have been removed.

Be patient. This video is without sound. It doesn’t need any.

[start]: A horizontally compressed copy of “The Image Breakers” (1566-1568) aka “Allegory of Iconoclasm”, an etching by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder (British Museum, Dept. of Print and Drawings, 1933.1.1..3, see also Edward Hodnett: “Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder”, Utrecht 1971, pp. 25-29). I mirrored the “nose” about a horizontal axis.

[end]: The Banker after his encounter with the Bandersnatch, depicted in a segment of Henry Holiday’s illustration to chapter “The Banker’s Fate” in Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” (scanned from an 1876 edition of the book)

Watch this animation with 480p: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06X98w0YvEU&hd=1

See also: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/goetzkluge/30595949

John Kornblum once was an American ambassador to Germany. This evening he participated in Günther Jauch’s late evening talk show (on the channel 1 in Germany) in discussing the NSA’s spying on German citizens, including leading politicians like Angela Merkel. Another participant was Marcel Rosenbach, a Journalist of the weekly SPIEGEL magazine. He discussed with Kornblum about Edward Snowden.

Kornblum accused Edward Snowden of not having used the official whistleblowing channels which would have been available to him in the US legal system. This is ridiculous. How could Snowden have relied on a lawfully managed whistleblowing system in a state which persistently acts against the law? Who would be so stupid to trust into a complaint system run by law breakers?

Snowden surely was not that foolish as Kornblum asked him to be. After what Snowden found out, this whistleblower knew that he could not rely anymore on law and order in the USA. It would be suicidal to report offenses to the offenders. The know about their offenses already too well.

This is how terrorism works: It puts the state into a Catch-22 situation which easily could lead the state to take countermeasures which destroy its own legal foundations. This is how we steer to the end of democracy.

This is about the Wealth Inequality in America Video. It is based on research by Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely:

Building a Better America−−One Wealth Quintile at a Time
Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely
Perspectives on Psychological Science 2011 6: 9
DOI: 10.1177/1745691610393524

The interesting issue in this research is that not only actual data had been presented, but also estimations and ideal distributions in the view of the public. I didn’t dig into the details, but from the graphs I computed three inequality measures.

Gini indices:

• 20% ideal
• 50% estimated
• 72% actual

Here we should not confuse the distributions of incomes and wealth. The actual data above are about wealth. As for the estimation, I fear, that people thought about income distribution, not about the wealth distribution. I guess, that the Gini for income distribution in the US also is around 50%. For Germany it is slightly above 40% for incomes and above 70% for wealth. Such wealth distributions may cause unrest, but that applies to Europe as much as it applies to the US.

As for what people think about an ideal distribution, also this might refer to incomes. Could information theory explain, why a Gini between 20% and 30% is “ideal” for many people?

By the way: If everybody would have the same income and everybody could save a bit from that income, the wealth of an individual would grow. That is, in such a scenario also an even income distribution would lead to an unequal wealth distribution.

See also: Wealth, Income, and Power by G. William Domhoff

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/10/the-flat-tax-fraud.html
(2011-10-22, by Mark Thoma, Department of Economics, University of Oregon)

“The Flat-Tax Fraud”

Robert Reich does not like the flat tax (I don’t either):

The Flat-Tax Fraud, and the Necessity of a Truly Progressive Tax, by Robert Reich: Herman Cain’s bizarre 9-9-9 plan would replace much of the current tax code with a 9 percent individual income tax and a 9 percent sales tax. He calls it a “flat tax.” Next week Rick Perry is set to announce his own version of a flat tax. …

The flat tax is a fraud. It raises taxes on the poor and lowers them on the rich. … The rich usually pay a higher percent of their incomes in income taxes than do the poor. A flat tax would eliminate that slight progressivity. [...]

That is not necessarily so as it depends on how the flat-tax is implemented. With a negative income tax you get progressivity back. The implementation is very simple and saves cost caused by the management of social welfare payments: http://goetzkluge.de/FlatTax_m_NegativSteuer.xls (sorry, the headers are in German).