This article probably OT for lobste.rs, but personally am interested in this kind of content (anyone up for a lobste.rs clone for this kind of alternative economy stuff?). This article is toothless though; as many words as it contains now it needs to be prefixed with that many again to explode terms from economic science like ‘economic growth’ and ‘income per capita’ and ‘sustainability’ into the smaller, understandable, re-humainsed concepts we need for the future: economic science can not fix economic science.
Ok, so for anyone interested: http://aesi.news:3000 (DNS still updating, www. seems to have updated faster for me)
Would like to play with it for a few days in ‘dev’ mode as I am not an expert sys admin or rails person so this needs to be ‘shored’ up a bit quickly if it gets used. @irene@brinker@zem PM your email address here for invitation.
Not really, it’s pretty self-contained. I hate external dependencies and dangling configuration files, so pretty much everything is in the git repo with the exception of the files listed in .gitignore. The nginx config is very typical for proxying to unicorn. There are two cron jobs, one that runs every 20 minutes to run rake ts:index and one that runs every 5 minutes to run script/mail_new_activity and script/post_to_twitter.
You know, I really like this model of “it’s easy to host your own” as a way to kind of spread the good things around and grow adjacent communities, without being Reddit.
Although subreddits have communities, a problem is as you get bigger, you succumb to reddit’s own hivemind, with its own problems.
Also note subreddits, for the most part, killed off traditional forums. It’s all under Reddit, instead of separate places, with their own style/accounts/etc.
Yes, essentially this. Subreddit moderators have a fair amount of autonomy, but are still working within Reddit’s larger policy framework. It means, for example, that the Lobsters invite-only policy wouldn’t make sense because it’s too large a user pool for that to mean anything. I don’t regard being part of Reddit as bad per se, it’s just a different choice.
I’d enjoy perhaps documentation in the repo about all this, speaking as someone who considered using the Lobsters code for a similar goal - perhaps there could be even an ecosystem around Lobsters “clones” focused on certain fields out of scope of Lobsters itself.
The code needs some reworking to abstract the remaining Lobsters-specific stuff in there, like wording in templates, icons, colors, etc. Most of the forks on Github are people using it for their own sites that have had to make a bunch of commits to re-brand it, but then they can’t rebase because of all their changes.
It was reasonably straightforward following the main readme. Had to fiddle a little with some dependencies and using rvm for managing ruby (Ubuntu 14.04) seemed useful as I had some problems with a dependency (nokogiri) that seemed to be related to using ruby 1.9.3, but using ruby 2.1.0 seemed to fix it. Other things outside the docs were setting up SMTP and creating content for About, etc. but nothing that took more than few mins to figure out.
Agreed, that would be a very interesting forum to have but is most likely of limited appeal here - I was surprised to realize we have a finance tag, so it’s worth asking for general opinions, but to really discuss economics involves a lot of specialized knowledge and almost certainly wouldn’t go well with an audience not primarily interested in it.
/r/economics is one of the two subreddits I read without feeling strange for reading Reddit (one of about five I read overall :)), and I do recommend it if you’re not aware of it.
If you start such a clone, I’ll join it. The lobste.rs codebase and policies are definitely a good basis for that sort of thing.
If we want to stick with the plural animal name domain-hack type, I’ve come up with the following options, which are all potentially available according to Domainr.
barracud.as
beave.rs
chinchill.as
cobr.as
dugon.gs
echidn.as
grasshoppe.rs
hamste.rs
herrin.gs
hyen.as
salamande.rs
starlin.gs
tapi.rs
vipe.rs
woodpecke.rs
Edit: Removed was.ps, as it turned out to not be a valid domain name.
.gs (dugon.gs, herrin.gs, and starlin.gs) looks to be as easy a a .com. I’ll check out the others.
Edit: .as (barracud.as, chinchill.as, cobr.as, echidn.as, and hyen.as) is easy but expensive. I’ve also removed was.ps, as it turned out not to be valid.
Given all of this, of the three it seems dugon.gs, herrin.gs, and starlin.gs are the best choices.
I use marcaria.com for most of my ccTLD registrations like lobste.rs, as they have agents in all of those countries to satisfy the local residency requirements. Pricing is quite a bit higher than normal domains because of that, though.
Ah, then that would change the list a bit, as I excluded any TLD with strict residency requirements from consideration. Anyway, it sounds like we’re going to punt on the name for now.
Looks like .gs is ~40EUR? I might start with a cheap throw away domain, see if some people use it and if they do then round up some people who want to share server/admin responsibility (all of us in this thread seem like initial candidates?) and rebrand at that point with a sweet strange animal name domain ;)
That sounds like a good idea - run the site on a boring .com or .org, for a while, first, and see whether it gathers critical mass. Naming discussions can take a while, anyway. :)
I have to decline your kind offer to administrate; mental health stuff periodically affects my SLA for that sort of task, so I’m not a good choice. But I hope other people on the thread will volunteer. :)
Faster-than-expoenential growth is older than we are. Literally, if you use a measure like lifeform complexity, this is true on the evolutionary scale: 3+ billion years with not much going on, then sexual reproduction makes evolution faster, then there’s the Cambrian explosion, in which it becomes an order of magnitude (technically this is subjective and “order of magnitude” might imply false precision, but I can make the argument) faster. Likewise, it took longer to get from multi-cellular life to rodents than from rodents to primates or from primates to us. This is also true of the world economy. The agrarian economy (10000 BC to 1700 AD) grew at about 0.05 to 0.2 percent per year, with fits and starts and periods of decline, and especially local declines like described in Byzantium and India. Moreover, economic growth was so slow (and human reproduction is faster, hence war and conquest) that quality of life didn’t improve by very much, because it would be gobbled up by more people. When economists say that there was no economic growth until 1700-1800 AD, they should be saying that there was minimal per capita growth.
Around 1700 AD, economic growth started hitting 0.3-0.5 percent world wide, and it crossed the 1%-per-year barrier around 1825. It’s now about 4.5%. Growth rates have been awful in the developed world (US, EU, Japan) but the world trend is still positive. Oddly enough, agrarian growth is still around 1% (as the long-term trend for land values illustrates). So it seems that there are “natural” growth rates for categories of processes. Biological evolution: very slow. Pre-agraian humanity: about 0.01% per year. Agrarian: about 1% per year. Industrial: about 3-5% per year. Technological: 20+ percent per year. But for all we might congratulate ourselves as technologists, the fact remains that much of the world’s needs are still industrial/agrarian. Only a tiny percentage of the economy, right now, can grow at a technological rate.
Now, climate change is a very serious problem. As in, we absolutely need to do something about it, and it’s worth it to tolerate some reduction in economic growth in order to do so. My suspicion (and this can only be proven by whether it happens, so it’s only that) is that bearing down on climate change will actually improve developed-world GDP growth in the long run, because while it will require putting the brakes on agrarian and industrial processes, we’ll shift more attention and resources toward the technological. We can, and should, make this our generation’s Manhattan Project.
The really unfortunate thing about humans is that we’re bad at assessing abstract risk. Have a nation state of an enemy, put a face on it, shape said face into a racist caricature and call it a nasty name, and people can mobilize. However, climate change is so subtle and diffuse that it’s hard even to discuss with many people. Worse yet, we have the global issues associated with this. We can’t reasonably ask China or India to stop burning carbon unless we provide resources to offset the demands being put on them (since, for them, this issue is about survival). This is something that we absolutely should do– here’s the food, produced in our solar greenhouses and fully on our tab, that you’re not making because we demanded that you not burn so much carbon fuels– but it’s going to be politically complicated.
Population decline is also not an unreasonable part of the solution because, thanks to birth control, we’re seeing a world in which people– happy with their lives and healthy, but not wanting to create more new humans than they can take care of– voluntarily depopulate. It’s good for everyone that population growth is slowing down. As far as I’m concerned, the main bad actors here are organized religions that spread misinformation about birth control and actively oppose it.
Exactly, he is quite negative about reducing emissions. There are good points too. Forest creation industries. LED light, solar panel, wind farm, car and house battery, house and even air filter design and manufacturing. Governments should be endorsing this sort of innovation instead of being chained to a polluting and scarce fossil fuel industry. I really believe these sort of technologies will play a big part in our society over the next few years.
This guy is mixing individual income levels with global warming, lol:
Limiting growth to zero, he found, had a modest impact on carbon spewed into the air. Only the “de-growth” situation — in which Canadians’ income per person shrank to its level in 1976 and the average working hours of employed Canadians declined by 75 percent — managed to slash emissions in a big way.
“Economic growth” != average income != carbon != global warming.
If he thinks those things are equivalent, I can see why he’s confused when people tell him that exponential growth cannot last forever.
This article probably OT for lobste.rs, but personally am interested in this kind of content (anyone up for a lobste.rs clone for this kind of alternative economy stuff?). This article is toothless though; as many words as it contains now it needs to be prefixed with that many again to explode terms from economic science like ‘economic growth’ and ‘income per capita’ and ‘sustainability’ into the smaller, understandable, re-humainsed concepts we need for the future: economic science can not fix economic science.
Ok, so for anyone interested: http://aesi.news:3000 (DNS still updating, www. seems to have updated faster for me)
Would like to play with it for a few days in ‘dev’ mode as I am not an expert sys admin or rails person so this needs to be ‘shored’ up a bit quickly if it gets used. @irene @brinker @zem PM your email address here for invitation.
@jcs any tips for a fresh lobste.rs install?
Not really, it’s pretty self-contained. I hate external dependencies and dangling configuration files, so pretty much everything is in the git repo with the exception of the files listed in
.gitignore. The nginx config is very typical for proxying to unicorn. There are two cron jobs, one that runs every 20 minutes to runrake ts:indexand one that runs every 5 minutes to runscript/mail_new_activityandscript/post_to_twitter.You know, I really like this model of “it’s easy to host your own” as a way to kind of spread the good things around and grow adjacent communities, without being Reddit.
What’s the problem with being Reddit?
Although subreddits have communities, a problem is as you get bigger, you succumb to reddit’s own hivemind, with its own problems.
Also note subreddits, for the most part, killed off traditional forums. It’s all under Reddit, instead of separate places, with their own style/accounts/etc.
Yes, essentially this. Subreddit moderators have a fair amount of autonomy, but are still working within Reddit’s larger policy framework. It means, for example, that the Lobsters invite-only policy wouldn’t make sense because it’s too large a user pool for that to mean anything. I don’t regard being part of Reddit as bad per se, it’s just a different choice.
Fair enough - I dislike the invite-only policy so I didn’t think of that.
[Comment removed by author]
I’d enjoy perhaps documentation in the repo about all this, speaking as someone who considered using the Lobsters code for a similar goal - perhaps there could be even an ecosystem around Lobsters “clones” focused on certain fields out of scope of Lobsters itself.
The code needs some reworking to abstract the remaining Lobsters-specific stuff in there, like wording in templates, icons, colors, etc. Most of the forks on Github are people using it for their own sites that have had to make a bunch of commits to re-brand it, but then they can’t rebase because of all their changes.
It was reasonably straightforward following the main readme. Had to fiddle a little with some dependencies and using rvm for managing ruby (Ubuntu 14.04) seemed useful as I had some problems with a dependency (nokogiri) that seemed to be related to using ruby 1.9.3, but using ruby 2.1.0 seemed to fix it. Other things outside the docs were setting up SMTP and creating content for About, etc. but nothing that took more than few mins to figure out.
great :) looking forward to it!
Agreed, that would be a very interesting forum to have but is most likely of limited appeal here - I was surprised to realize we have a finance tag, so it’s worth asking for general opinions, but to really discuss economics involves a lot of specialized knowledge and almost certainly wouldn’t go well with an audience not primarily interested in it.
/r/economics is one of the two subreddits I read without feeling strange for reading Reddit (one of about five I read overall :)), and I do recommend it if you’re not aware of it.
If you start such a clone, I’ll join it. The lobste.rs codebase and policies are definitely a good basis for that sort of thing.
What’s the other subreddit you read without feeling strange?
Also, I too would join a lobste.rs-like forum for the discussion of economics.
/r/raisedbynarcissists, but you can see how that’s not as widespread an interest. :)
got an idea for a name for it? @brinker
If we want to stick with the plural animal name domain-hack type, I’ve come up with the following options, which are all potentially available according to Domainr.
Edit: Removed was.ps, as it turned out to not be a valid domain name.
Woah, great list. Pretty sure the plural of herring is herring though :/
are any of these actually easy to register? had a quick look at .rs and it seems non trivial.
.gs (dugon.gs, herrin.gs, and starlin.gs) looks to be as easy a a .com. I’ll check out the others.
Edit: .as (barracud.as, chinchill.as, cobr.as, echidn.as, and hyen.as) is easy but expensive. I’ve also removed was.ps, as it turned out not to be valid.
Given all of this, of the three it seems dugon.gs, herrin.gs, and starlin.gs are the best choices.
I use marcaria.com for most of my ccTLD registrations like lobste.rs, as they have agents in all of those countries to satisfy the local residency requirements. Pricing is quite a bit higher than normal domains because of that, though.
Ah, then that would change the list a bit, as I excluded any TLD with strict residency requirements from consideration. Anyway, it sounds like we’re going to punt on the name for now.
and it’s hard to believe all of those totally awesome names are free, no? ;)
I just double-checked. Looks like dugon.gs, herrin.gs, and starlin.gs are all actually available for registration.
Looks like .gs is ~40EUR? I might start with a cheap throw away domain, see if some people use it and if they do then round up some people who want to share server/admin responsibility (all of us in this thread seem like initial candidates?) and rebrand at that point with a sweet strange animal name domain ;)
That sounds like a good idea - run the site on a boring .com or .org, for a while, first, and see whether it gathers critical mass. Naming discussions can take a while, anyway. :)
I have to decline your kind offer to administrate; mental health stuff periodically affects my SLA for that sort of task, so I’m not a good choice. But I hope other people on the thread will volunteer. :)
I like the lighthearted feel of starlin.gs. But dugon.gs would stick with the theme of marine life that doesn’t get a lot of positive attention. :)
alt.economies, with a nod back to usenet? (also, i’d definitely subscribe to it!)
Is that an extant TLD?
it’d have to be alt.economi.es of course :)
ah, naturally :)
You know, with all the new gTLDs being registered, I wouldn’t have been surprised if this actually did exist. But it looks like it doesn’t … yet.
[Comment removed by author]
A few things that are missed here.
Faster-than-expoenential growth is older than we are. Literally, if you use a measure like lifeform complexity, this is true on the evolutionary scale: 3+ billion years with not much going on, then sexual reproduction makes evolution faster, then there’s the Cambrian explosion, in which it becomes an order of magnitude (technically this is subjective and “order of magnitude” might imply false precision, but I can make the argument) faster. Likewise, it took longer to get from multi-cellular life to rodents than from rodents to primates or from primates to us. This is also true of the world economy. The agrarian economy (10000 BC to 1700 AD) grew at about 0.05 to 0.2 percent per year, with fits and starts and periods of decline, and especially local declines like described in Byzantium and India. Moreover, economic growth was so slow (and human reproduction is faster, hence war and conquest) that quality of life didn’t improve by very much, because it would be gobbled up by more people. When economists say that there was no economic growth until 1700-1800 AD, they should be saying that there was minimal per capita growth.
Around 1700 AD, economic growth started hitting 0.3-0.5 percent world wide, and it crossed the 1%-per-year barrier around 1825. It’s now about 4.5%. Growth rates have been awful in the developed world (US, EU, Japan) but the world trend is still positive. Oddly enough, agrarian growth is still around 1% (as the long-term trend for land values illustrates). So it seems that there are “natural” growth rates for categories of processes. Biological evolution: very slow. Pre-agraian humanity: about 0.01% per year. Agrarian: about 1% per year. Industrial: about 3-5% per year. Technological: 20+ percent per year. But for all we might congratulate ourselves as technologists, the fact remains that much of the world’s needs are still industrial/agrarian. Only a tiny percentage of the economy, right now, can grow at a technological rate.
Now, climate change is a very serious problem. As in, we absolutely need to do something about it, and it’s worth it to tolerate some reduction in economic growth in order to do so. My suspicion (and this can only be proven by whether it happens, so it’s only that) is that bearing down on climate change will actually improve developed-world GDP growth in the long run, because while it will require putting the brakes on agrarian and industrial processes, we’ll shift more attention and resources toward the technological. We can, and should, make this our generation’s Manhattan Project.
The really unfortunate thing about humans is that we’re bad at assessing abstract risk. Have a nation state of an enemy, put a face on it, shape said face into a racist caricature and call it a nasty name, and people can mobilize. However, climate change is so subtle and diffuse that it’s hard even to discuss with many people. Worse yet, we have the global issues associated with this. We can’t reasonably ask China or India to stop burning carbon unless we provide resources to offset the demands being put on them (since, for them, this issue is about survival). This is something that we absolutely should do– here’s the food, produced in our solar greenhouses and fully on our tab, that you’re not making because we demanded that you not burn so much carbon fuels– but it’s going to be politically complicated.
Population decline is also not an unreasonable part of the solution because, thanks to birth control, we’re seeing a world in which people– happy with their lives and healthy, but not wanting to create more new humans than they can take care of– voluntarily depopulate. It’s good for everyone that population growth is slowing down. As far as I’m concerned, the main bad actors here are organized religions that spread misinformation about birth control and actively oppose it.
Exactly, he is quite negative about reducing emissions. There are good points too. Forest creation industries. LED light, solar panel, wind farm, car and house battery, house and even air filter design and manufacturing. Governments should be endorsing this sort of innovation instead of being chained to a polluting and scarce fossil fuel industry. I really believe these sort of technologies will play a big part in our society over the next few years.
This guy is mixing individual income levels with global warming, lol:
“Economic growth” != average income != carbon != global warming.
If he thinks those things are equivalent, I can see why he’s confused when people tell him that exponential growth cannot last forever.
Oh, i got the impression he had a computer model. He tweeked growth to see what happened to carbon emissions.
Imagine a world without Surplus Value