Recent comments by Nathan Coppedge

• Exceptions Become the Rule

  Some of this topic is interesting to the 'higher forms' of statistics, e.g. status quo preferences as a floating wave, and preferential off-set systems which have potential to modify the status quo.
  
  As a separate issue, I find the idea of 'citizen preferences' compelling. Ideally, it would increase visibility for many forms of entertainment and employment, leverage some forms of subsidized small businesses, and also increase visibility for writers and artists seeking a market, or highly employable people who have not found their desired job. There is a potential for 'branding' swathes or webs of relations between employability, product, market, etc. creating what may be called 'informational corollaries' that is, factors which are a function of information alone. There is then a market for what I call 'culinary information' or 'culled information', which is perhaps for-pay contributions of special perspectives on scenes, brands, blurbs, and art, etc. These new 'associative brands' then feed into the 'ground-level' 'force-feedback' of creating a responsive consumer who feels integrated with products, information, and society.
  
  As Dyson says, government is part of this, and so are other trends like electronic medicine.

• Violence and Innovation

  Maybe it is just GDP and quality of life, which are also reflected in the power of the military.
  
  I suspect it has more to do with population and level of treatment within the population, including strategic uses of stress, such as caffeine consumption.
  
  Interestingly, caffeine consumption may also explain post-modernism.

• Why Work at Work?

  That is, if sacrifice is the paradigm, then it makes sense, but if cooking the vegetables is the paradigm, then it loses out. In my view, the social personality feeds on destructive thinking, not realizing what it actually represents. It loses the opportunity for cooking vegetables, and thus actually the potential for real ideas. Many businesses appear to survive by magic, not by their ostensible personalities. This means that no one is actually employed by them. But highly social people disagree (and are rare indeed, but not always valuable).

• Why Work at Work?

  Re: Dyson "Indeed, the whole point of having managers is that they are supposed to exercise judgment. Otherwise, computers and the Internet would allow us not just to work from home, but to report to a software program rather than to a person." and Zsolt Hermann "I agree with the writer that at this stage, for the present adult generation, when most of our engagements are still conducted in a physical environment, working together, meeting, inspiring each other physically is beneficial"
  
  In my experience the few highly productive are abusing their positions, and leaving a husk of what otherwise is a high-strung but more creative context of interaction. Employers and managers who demand a social mentality run the risk of destroying business creativity. Thus it must embody a different motive, such as simple business consolidation and greed, or purely selfish connections which have become bloated with subjective interpretations of 'value' and 'correspondence'. I have observed psychologically that social people have a way of becoming more and more inter-meshed with their own types of people, the result being emotionally productive but not always socially productive. Certainly this behavior doesn't serve the middle person, so unless the middle person can be manipulated from within this system (unless she or he has a social personality) it seems that there is a lot of potential for lost work.

• Commodities on the Rise

  It is also worth mentioning that there is potential with space mining and (eventually) off-earth enterprises. I suspect someone will design robots that can construct an energy facility at some point. The only question is, how close to the sun? Perhaps nanotechnology of certain types could begin building airconditioned cities around the sun in the next 200 years. I'm optimistic. Although the miracles of philosophy are not always possible in other disciplines, certainly there are disciplines which have miracles of their own. Maybe all of them.
  
  The miracle of commodities is its sort of relative. Consumer demand exists regardless of price. The real material questions of starvation and medical services are supposedly resolvable when there is enough wealth. Consider for example, that part of the value of money is to 'throw its weight around' resulting in free services for some, if not all, sectors of populations. As long as people remain consumers and spend the money that they have, it doesn't matter how many services are provided, it is equally effectual, or better.
  
  I suspect that commodity prices rise in general whenever the economy improves. There are economists that call this a fallacy, but consumer demand is partly a function of the quality of services, which inevitably improves, or seems to improve, when the economy is doing well. The question is simply whether the quality is trivial, and whether the improvement is trivial; the two things are really like opposites; Improvement only occurs when businesses profit, and quality is partly a matter of perspective. Economic health is something like the combination of good consumer psychology and efficient production management. If that is not the case, then there is the emergence of a non-relative economy in which inflation, competition, or commodity prices destroys investor confidence. Really, if industries are reliable and there is good consumer psychology, then everything is macro-economics.