Name our Manx, Watchmen, Economics, Stuff

[tcpip]

caseopaya and I would like to welcome the newest member of our household. An, as yet, unnamed Manx kitten. He's integrating well with the rabbits, but hasn't met the rats yet. Help us el-jay! Help us name our cat.



Went to see Watchmen last night. It has some changes from Allan Moore's classic comic series of superheroes and the very real fear in the early 1980s of nuclear war, but the changes don't alter the storyline or theme and indeed the one big change at the end actually makes much more sense (big credits here to the screenwriters, who must had balls of steel to try this). It is that the core content was included in the 170 minutes and the charactre portrayals as pretty good well, especially Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. I suspect that history will largely absolve Zack Snyder's pretty average effort with 300 with this film. A genuine pity that Pop Will Eat Itself's Def Con One wasn't included in the soundtrack.

An inordinate amount of time was spent this week writing Normative and Postive Economics: An Isocratic Sketch, an attempts to reconcile, or at least find appropriate types of economic activity for socialist and capitalist means of ownership and planned or market means of distribution and exchange, and at the same time recommending the socialisation of income from natural resources. Comments invited. This week I also joined Amnesty International Australia. This is an organisation I joined and let my membership lapse several times over the past twenty-five years or so. This time, I've checked the box for 'renew every year'; the wonders of modern technology!

Recently lokicarbis had a good idea for extending the functionality libraries; I have been playing with since Koha since then, which is great one you get the right version of Perl installed (*mutter*, *mutter*). In more Loki-related news, I'm looking after several crates of RPGs for him; at the same time, I've finally gotten around to cataloguing many extras that I have and am putting these up for sale on RPG Review. I also have a big collection of stuff that I just want to give away; including an Encore W255 Acoustic Guitar, a whole bunch of VHS videos (including series one and two of Friends.. uh, yeah), a lot of IT books including Microsoft MSCE NT books, Visual Basic books, MCDBA SQL server 7 and Oracle 8 books, a collection of 3D Studio Max guides etc. etc.

Comments

[kallistos.livejournal.com]

Tcp, I really liked your summation of economics. Kudos for the rather clear and effective descriptions.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Thanks for those kind words; although I have received only a bit of feedback on the writing so far (I guess not that many people are interested in economics), what I have received has been positive (and I should say - more appropriately for normative statements, "good").

It's a fairly odd road to walk, that tries to combine Marxian-influenced Georgism and pro-capitalist Austrian school models. No doubt many from both sides do not think it's possible.

[kallistos.livejournal.com]

I did find the call for a return to Political Economy to be an excellent suggestion and I agree the abandonment of this has caused many issues to be missed or misinterpreted.

The passage:

"A general principle that can be suggested here is that the closer that a good or service is to being a natural monopoly the greater the requirement for centralised socialisation as a public service, and the close the good or service is to being in accord to perfect competition (including monopolistic competition), the greater the requirement for decentralised private ownership in a variety of forms (including cooperatives etc). Likewise the smaller the number of input and output variables the greater the possibility of accurate planning, whereas the greater number of such variables suggests efficacy of a price mechanism to deal with issues of relative scarcity and opportunity cost. The aforementioned public income should be spend entirely on matters of transparent public goods for the general benefit; the mitigation of negative externalities (e.g., pollution), the enhancement of positive externalities (e.g., networks, education)."

Is an excellent suggestion, which I note does fit with what I've found in restudying economics.

I'm an econ geek. It was economics that got me into politics and at first libertarianism.

I'm increasingly Georgian and that combination of institutions described above is a good summary of my current thinking.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh, and one other thing... Sign up to isocracy! I'd really appreciate your input there...

[kallistos.livejournal.com]

Hmm., How do I do that?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Go here...

http://isocracy.org/user/register