This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Open the Music Industry’s Black Box - (That) David Byrne, in the New York Times: I'm a dirty hippie who believes that paywalling art is, all else being equal, a bad idea. Byrne doesn't seem to agree with me on that, but is rightly perturbed that the kind of people who used to justify their income by the production and movement of plastic discs, still appear to be making way more money than the artists who no longer need the plastic discs.
• Say goodbye to the weirdest border dispute in the world - Sam Taylor at WaPo: I still maintain that "border protection" is a meaningless occupation—you can neither protect nor damage an imaginary line—but this example verges on the justifiable. Which only adds to the argument that if your borders happen also to be oceans, you should STFU.
• This Hacker’s Tiny Device Unlocks Cars And Opens Garages - Andy Greenberg, Wired: "'My own car is fully susceptible to this attack. I don’t think that’s right when we know this is solvable.'"
• Oracle security chief to customers: Stop checking our code for vulnerabilities - Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica: And we'd have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling hackers!
• That’s Not Funny! Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke - Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic: "I saw ample evidence of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described, as well as another, not unrelated factor: the infantilization of the American undergraduate, and this character’s evolving status in the world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be constantly supported and championed. To understand this change, it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex."
• Supervenience, isomers, and social isomers - Daniel Little: "Significantly, this example appears to have direct implications for the relation between social facts and individual actors. If we consider the possibility of "social isomers" -- social structures consisting of exactly similar actors but different histories and different configurations and causal properties in the present -- then we also have a refutation of the idea that social facts supervene upon the actors of which they are constituted."
• Why Economists Have Trouble With Bubbles - Noah Smith at Bloomberg View: "But there has always been one big problem with rational expectations -- it might just not be right. People really might make systematic mistakes in the way they predict the workings of the economy. If economists insist on using an incorrect assumption as the core of their models, it will force them into ever more Byzantine theoretical contortions, as the models repeatedly fail to fit the facts."
• In the Age of Trump, Will Democrats Sell Out More, Or Less? - Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: "[…] framing every single decision solely in terms of its utility in beating the Republicans leads to absurdities. Not every situation is a ballot with Ralph Nader on it. The Democrats insisted they had to support the Iraq War in order to compete with Bush, but they ended up not competing with Bush anyway and supporting a crappy war that no sane person believed in. All it won Democratic voters in the end was a faster trip into Iraq, and the honor of having supported the war at the ballot box."
• Third Bailout and the Third Punic War - John Weeks, guestblogging at TripleCrisis: "In pursuit of setting “the EU’s political agenda,” [president of the European Council, Donald] Tusk cemented his right-wing credentials by stating publicly that “I am really afraid of this ideological or political contagion, not financial contagion, of this Greek crisis.” Lest anyone miss his point, the former Polish prime minister went on to say that his concern was caused by the “radical leftist illusion that you can build some alternative” to the EU’s neoliberal economic model."
• The Down Under book and film remind us our copyright law’s still unfair for artists - Nicolas Suzor and Rachel Choi from QUT in The Conversation: "Greg Ham’s flute riff is exactly the kind of tribute that imposes no costs on the original creator. Both the documentary and the book point out that, in fact, this is not just harmless copying of copyright expression – it’s exactly the kind of creativity that Australian copyright law should encourage."
• The Politics of Economics and ‘Very Serious People’ - Mark Thoma in the Fiscal Times: Mark reflects on Henry's article. I find his conclusion that "when the economics and politics are at odds, as they often are on issues such as free trade and immigration, the economics must prevail" unsatisfyingly utilitarian. Moral, and consequently political, considerations must precede any determination of desirable economic outcomes.
• 12 Good and Bad Parts of Online Education - Mark Thoma again: I agree that internal v. online education is an apples and oranges comparison. Which is why the latter shouldn't be used as a blanket cut-price alternative to the former. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with online education, provided the delivery mode suits the subject matter.
• Neoliberal realpolitik: choking others in our name - Markha Valenta, openDemocracy: "In this way, the deaths of the 20,000 migrants who have perished on Europe’s iron doorstep in the face of ever more stringent surveillance, policing, and legislation – barbed wire fences slicing feet, hands, grazing any bit of brown skin, border guards beating those they catch; whole seas and generations of fish fed on their drowned bodies; roads stained by their truck-crushed carcasses – all these dead are said to have only themselves to blame."
• New Labour is 'unelectable' - Amit Singh at openDemocracy: "It is Jeremy Corbyn, not the other candidates, who is targeting the majority of voters who shunned the Tories (and also shunned Labour). This is why he is becoming so popular, because an anti-austerity, social justice message does have scope. […] Just look at the shadow cabinet who all look so quintessentially Blair, and so similar to their Tory opponents. They went to the same sort of schools, the same sort of universities and worked the same sort of corporate jobs before becoming politicians. People don't want New Labour, that's abundantly clear. The only people who want New Labour are Labour."
• Yanis Varoufakis is being pilloried for doing what had to be done - Philippe Legrain at the Guardian: I have two observations: a) In what way was Varoufakis "outspoken" during his tenure as finance minister? This is a man who presumably had to pack his tongue in ice every evening after a long day biting it. And b) Tax(/council rate) credits also seem to be a jolly sensible solution to less extreme forms of fiscal imbalance, such as that suffered by municipal councils, as well as encouraging local economic development.
• We took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life - Patrick Hogan in some sort of clickbaity thing called Fusion: I daresay I could find you a clutch of administrators (yes, that is the collective noun) at Aussie Swazi University still prepared to put money (not their own, of course) on our inevitable Second Life future. Some of them have even caught on to this up and coming thing called MOOCs. What if you could do a MOOC in Second Life? Just imagine yourself in this compellingly immersive virtual environment that's almost exactly like sitting alone at home in front of the computer, in your underpants, doing an online multiple choice quiz!
• Dentists and Skin in the Game - Paul Krugman, NYT: "As it turns out, many fewer people have dental insurance than have general medical insurance; even where there is insurance, it typically leaves a lot of skin in the game. But dental costs have risen just as fast as overall health spending, and it may be that the reduced role of insurers actually raises those costs."
• A Most Peculiar Friendship - Yanis Varoufakis: "Tories like Lord Lamont and lefties of my sort may disagree strongly on society’s ends. But we agree that rules and markets are means to social ends that can only be determined by a sovereign people through a Parliament in which that sovereignty is vested."
• The Defeat of Europe – my piece in Le Monde Diplomatique - Yanis Varoufakis: "No European people should ever again be put in a position of negotiating in fear. For that to happen, Europeans must not fear to negotiate a European New Deal that restores the dream of shared prosperity within a democratic polity. If we fail, barbarism will rise up from within. For a continent that has generated the best and the worst humans are capable of, this ought to be a sobering thought."
• The socialist objective - John Quiggin: "So, it’s pretty clear that removing the socialist objective is not a matter of moving away from a dogmatic commitment to public ownership. Rather, it means abandoning any notion that Labor aspires to change society for the better, or that it has any fundamental disagreement with market liberals."
• Bailout Money Goes to Greece, Only to Flow Out Again - Jack Ewing and Liz Alderman: "Since 2010, Greece has received €227 billion from other eurozone countries and the I.M.F. Of that, €48.2 billion went to replenish the capital of Greek banks, according to MacroPolis, an analytics firm based in Athens. More than €120 billion went to pay debt and interest, and around €35 billion went to commercial banks that had taken losses on Greek debt."
• Every club should be like Labour – you can’t join as a new member unless you’re already a member - Mark Steel at the Independent (via Simon Wren-Lewis): "Because the most important job for any political leader, as we’re told every day, is to 'stay in the centre ground'. You could argue a true leader tries to change the centre ground, but that’s romantic nonsense. So a sensible Labour leader in the year 1500 would have said: 'It’s all very well Jeremy Corbyn promising to stop burning witches, but that will lose us the election by abandoning the centre ground.'"
• In conversation with El Pais (Claudi Pérez), the complete (long) transcript - Yanis Varoufakis: Q: "I think that is a uncontroversial: your ideas about austerity and debt relief, everybody says you are right." A: "If you were talking to me in January it would not have been so. The only reason why now this is not controversial anymore is because we struggled for six months. For those who say to me we failed, these six months were in vain, I say “No we did not fail”. Now we have a debate in Europe which it’s not just about Greece, it’s about the continent. A debate we would have not had otherwise."