Thursday, December 12, 2013

Misery to Unhappiness

Corey Robin at his blog on the topic of Obamacare and more broadly about the welfare state:
Aside from the numbers, what I’m always struck by in these discussions is just how complicated Obamacare is. Even if we accept all the premises of its defenders, the number of steps, details, caveats, and qualifications that are required to defend it, is in itself a massive political problem. As we’re now seeing.
More important than the politics, that byzantine complexity is a symptom of what the ordinary citizen has to confront when she tries to get health insurance for herself or her family. As anyone who has even good insurance knows, navigating that world of numbers and forms and phone calls can be a daunting proposition. It requires inordinate time, doggedness, savvy, intelligence, and manipulative charm (lest you find yourself on the wrong end of a disgruntled telephone operator). Obamacare fits right in with that world and multiplies it.
I’m not interested in arguing here over what was possible with health care reform and what wasn’t; we’ve had that debate a thousand times. But I thought it might be useful to re-up part of this post I did, when I first started blogging, on how much time and energy our capitalist world requires us to waste, and what a left approach to the economy might have to say about all that. It is this world of everyday experience—what it’s like to try and get basic goods for yourself and/or your family—that I wish the left (both liberals and leftists) was more in touch with.
The post is in keeping with an idea I’ve had about socialism and the welfare state for several years now. Cribbing from Freud, and drawing from my own anti-utopian utopianism, I think the point of socialism is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. God, that would be so great.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Vibracathedral Orchestra - Versatile Arab Chord Chart LP

Yma Sumac- "Amor Indio"

Transforming Finance

From Ian Fraser's blog about the video:
Transforming Finance, a 23-minute documentary film produced by the Finance Innovation Lab, features interviews with a number of the most prominent advocates of change in the world of finance. The film seeks to identify policy interventions to reform the financial system – both through incentives to persuade existing players to mend their ways, and through the promotion of alternative business models (such as peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding). The Finance Innovation Lab describes the film as both a “manifesto for action” and as a campaign tool, that will act as a catalyst for change.

Tiger Hatchery- "Chieftain"

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Ernest Bloch- Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Pianoforte, "Poeme Mystique"

Composed in 1924, performed here by Donald Weilerstein, violin, and Vivian Hornick Weilerstein, pianoforte.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Seabat- "Scattered Disc" (LP)

Grapefruit- "Stolen Highway" (LP)

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Ohbliv- Spirit Daps

L-VIS 1990 - Ballads EP

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Free the Robots - In Other Worlds EP

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Quote of the Day

“My name is John Francis Pastorius III, and I am the greatest electric bass player in the world.” – Jaco Pastorius

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Weather Report- "Gibraltar"

Live in Japan, soundboard recording

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Jim Guthrie- " Sword & Sworcery LP - The Ballad of the Space Babies"

Thursday, March 14, 2013

NMODL and Superstitious Programming

"In general it can be difficult to know a programmer's intent, and in some cases it may even be more difficult to decide what is intentional and what is accidental (especially when the topic is NMODL source code--not least because NMODL's strange syntax tends to invite what might be called "superstitious programming" i.e. odd bits and pieces of code or syntax that serve no evident purpose, but got there by virtue of rote replication of excerpts lifted from prior examples of "working code")." -Michael Hines

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Bibio- "À tout à l'heure"

Calvin Love- "New Radar"

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Ila Fiete- "A New Class of Neural Population Codes for Analog Variables"

She will be speaking at Cosyne 2013. This talk was given at the Allen Institute last year.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Zac Nelson- Charbroile

Out of Debacle

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Lil Ugly Man- Mista Thug Isolation

Saturday, January 5, 2013