Jake's Latest News
Ski Champ!!! - Tuesday 27th January 2004
I?m in Andorra, Pas de la Casa resort, at the end of my 2nd day on the slopes (skiing, that is). Its awesome - third time I?ve been, last time was four years ago with school. I thought I was gonna be real shit, but am actually pretty good. I?m doing intermediate lessons and am in the second highest group. The slopes are amazing and I did a few black runs today, only fell over once!
Interesting copyright law with tape recordings - Sunday 18th January 2004
I found this Guardian article quite interesting. 20 years ago Sony won a court case against the evil Disney (recently extended Copyright laws to protect their beloved Mickey mouse) and Universal Studios. Disney and Universal wanted to ban tape recording programmes, which bears similarities to cases concerning Copyright and Digital Rights on music and other media today.
Copyright laws suck. I respect that people like to make some money from their works, but in my coming dissertation I will be suggesting a future society in which copyright laws will have to be dismantled, or reformed to something akin to Creative Commons to enable society to continue to function.
Twisted economic values - Monday 12th January 2004
In an essay I wrote last year, I quoted Ben Elton’s ‘This Other Eden’:
“Consumer confidence is actually considered a measure of a country’s relative economic strength… Consumption is synonymous with ‘growth’ and growth is good… Judged by the logic of world economics, the death of the planet will be the zenith of human achievement, because if consumption is always good, then to consume a whole planet must be the best thing of all” (Elton, 1993:125)
I was reminded of this when I read a story about a man who collected all the junk mail he received on the BBC News website today. The guy received 701 items through the year, coming to 70lb in weight. The story highlights how wasteful the direct marketing industry is, and one reason why I hate it.
Yet the guy goes on to concede that there are “benefits to society from junk mail with employment for postmen, printing workers and direct marketing employees.”. Argh!!! Is that why we work, so that we all have jobs? If something can be done better without anyone working, is that not surely better? It frees our time to do other things, to enjoy our lives, to educate ourselves, to have fun. Yet another underlying reason for my forthcoming dissertation.
As I suspected - never trust unemployment figures - Sunday 11th January 2004
Unemployment/job-seeker figures make me mad. They cover the fact that proper, full-time jobs are being lost from the economy. They’re usually based upon job-seekers, and not everyone bothers looking for a job if they know they can’t find one. As this article says, in the US in December the unemployment rate was at a 14-month low. But this wasn’t because of new jobs being created (I explain why new jobs are unlikely to be created in my dissertation) but because of people not bothering looking for jobs any more as its a waste of their time.
For my dissertation I’m still considering what statistics or sources to use to demonstrate my assertion that the near future will be plagued with mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale due to new efficiencies created by technology, such as the Internet and robotics. My current plan is to take an extensive look at as many different jobs as possible in the economy and explain why they will cease to exist in the near future, and then relate this in percentage terms to the employment market as a whole to calculate the estimated unemployment rate in years to come.
Sociology essay: Internet and freedom - Thursday 8th January 2004
I’ve just finished an essay on title ‘Does the Internet provide the basis for a public sphere that approximates to Habermas’ vision‘. I’m not too sure how it’ll be received though - the module its for is contemporary sociological theory, and this essay get very technical and doesn’t cover a lot of the sociological theory. Oh well, I hope someone enjoys reading it, I learnt quite a lot from writing it.
More news can be found in the archives. I have an RSS feed.
Blog by WordPress (login, register)
