Saturday, May 19, 2012

Collectivize Farmville! Twitter pay my Student Loans! Limit Human Potential! or I wonder if these are related.

Apparently Ezra Klein is reenacting his Bourbon Bolshevism by demanding Facebook hand over the means of production. I do find it adorable that people voluntarily using a free service specifically designed to make money off of the said use is "The Story of Modern Income Inequality".

Wow Ezra, you discovered that unless one is paying for a service you're not its customer. Instead your part of the company's product that it sells to its real costumers. Like how Google sells access for advertisers of how the evil Facebook does the same or... MSNBC does the same too.

But it doesn't matter, the babble about "exploiting the workers" sells very well on people that want to feel that they are exploited, and as a bonus can do it without having any coal under their nails. Collectivize Farmville! Or as Tam snarks:

The idea that this garbage still sells in a world that has already traveled the historical arc from the storming of the Winter Palace to the fall of the Berlin Wall is just damned depressing. Rather than having to root out the last bolshevik holdouts from the cellars of the Lubyanka, we'll need to dig them out of the third floor of 30 Rock.


If Ezra really hates the Facebooks well... he doesn't have to use it.

Seriously, there's no "Social Media Mandate" he can keep on trucking and push for his viewers to abandon the service and maybe try to have MSNBC pull any sponsorship of what have. Not using a product because you do not like it is perfectly cromulent.

Though I can see Ezra also pulling for congressional investigation into "predatory meme posting".

Maybe he could have Face Book go all Myspace, and replace it with Ezra's more "equitable" means where each poster owns the means of production.

You know, split that IPO among every user. Though I suspect that if Ezra had his own Social Media page he'd be just as stingy with that money as he is at hitting Tam's tip jar. Though as Tam points out: : "The Rich" = "Anyone Who Makes More Than Me".


Meanwhile we see something that I'm sure is purely coincidental of the "Facebook Generation":

The majority of the 79 million U.S. Millennials are either unemployed, underpaid, or weighed down with student loans. One in four Millennials, for instance, has more debt than savings, according to Bankrate.com. Some 94% of college students currently graduate with debt. The current unemployment rate among workers ages 20-24 is 13%, compared to 8% for older workers, according to the most recent economic data.

At the same time, Millennial college students (without full-time jobs) spend $784 a month on discretionary expenses, especially food and entertainment, according to the Mooslyvania marketing agency. Millennials are the largest demographic purchasing new technological gadgets and fashion apparel. And their spending on jewelry increased 27% in 2011, according to American Express Business Insights.

Though as David Swindle notes: "it’s not like our predecessors did any better." And shows a big old national debt cliff.


And if you want more economic mercantilism here's Robb Allen on an article by the Greens who want you to starve in the dark and be ignorant of it.

It’s not just resources that are limited, in the WWF’s view: human potential itself is up against a hard limit beyond which the race cannot ever advance. Even progress thus far, as seen in the wealthy nations, has been achieved only by an unfair and wasteful over-use of precious resources: we rich Westerners are already beyond the practical limits that humans should ever aspire to achieve in terms of health, wealth – and even of education.

My religion offers salvation, theirs offers starvation. And they know this. And they want this. Not for themselves, mind you – they’ll be rationalizing away on how they require a better standard of living so as to ensure you do not. They would prefer (other) humans die off en masse so that… uh… metal can stay in the ground?


Emphasis in original.

The World Wildlife Foundation is litterally saying that us Westerners are getting smarter (or at least more educated) at the cost of the rest of the planet.

Really? Yeah the cost of education is a gigantic fiscal drain and a huge debt bomb, but I don't see American colleges working by stealing books and lab equipment and money from Indonesian schools.

Scratch a progressive and you'll find an aristocrat whining about how the proles don't "know their place".

No comments: