Kategorie: Allgemein

The Farmer Bay.

  • 2015-04-26

The pièce de résistance in John Deere’s argument: permitting owners to root around in a tractor’s programming might lead to pirating music through a vehicle’s entertainment system. Because copyright-marauding farmers are very busy and need to multitask by simultaneously copying Taylor Swift’s 1989 and harvesting corn? (I’m guessing, because John Deere’s lawyers never explained why anyone would pirate music on a tractor, only that it could happen.)

And, somehow, the notion of actually owning the things you buy has become revolutionary.

Kyle Wiens: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership, In: WIRED 04.21.15

Votastrophy.

  • 2015-04-25

Please click here if you still believe in voting computers. Or if you want to laugh and cry a bit.

Beziehungsw[tf/ahn/ahrheit].

  • 2015-04-24

Well, this exists now. And this of course.

Condolence.

  • 2015-04-23

That awkward moment when you want to report a bug, but the author of the software already died ...

ReTeach.

  • 2015-04-22

Education is riddled with market failures. We know so. We teach this. This reality calls for non-market interventions. It screams for democratization. What shape and form democratization should take is exactly what ReThink is currently discussing. We should therefore not stay silent anymore, if only because rethinking the academic enterprise is too important to be left entirely to non-economists. Everybody should engage. In the end, Dutch economist Hennipman taught at the UvA’s economics faculty that taking a broad welfare perspective implies that profit is not the same as welfare. That made Hennipman a critic of rendementsdenken avant-la-lettre. Of course, many economics departments -including UvA- already don’t teach the history of economics anymore, so we also don’t teach Hennipman. The irony is that his lesson is one that we cannot afford to forget.

David Hollanders: Why economists should engage with ReThink