Things have been more grim than ever (and that's saying something) in our little Colorbond-clad corner of sunny Sawtell. Fortunately, I can always escape reality via the Internet. This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Lesser-Known Trolley Problem Variations - Kyle York at McSweeney's Internet Tendency: "The Time Traveller: There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards a worker. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits a different worker. The different worker is actually the first worker ten minutes from now."
• Do you ever really own a computerized device? - Toronto Globe and Mail interviews Cory Doctorow: "So this creates this really weird regime where effectively you get to make up your own laws: You put a lock on, you prevent something from happening and suddenly it becomes illegal to do that. Even if Parliament or Congress never sat down to do that. Can that law really pass constitutional muster?"
• The History of the Future of the Push-Button School - Audrey Watters: "'The high school becomes partially transformed into a center run by administrators and clerks, with a minimum of the routine assigned to the teaching staff. […] The creation of educational material moves partially out into industry, which goes into the education business in partnership with educators.'"
• ‘They,’ the Singular Pronoun, Gets Popular - Ben Zimmer, WSJ: People like me have strong feelings about issues like this.
• Government inquiry takes aim at green charities that ‘get political’ - Peter Burdon on the Conversation: "While conceding that the Hawke review may be interpreted as an “attack on [environmental organisations'] efforts to protect the environment”, [Gary] Johns also argued that governments “should be reticent” about supporting organisations that “promote viewpoints on issues where there is reasonable disagreement in the electorate”. It is difficult to see what organisations would satisfy such a test. Certainly not the Institute of Public Affairs, the Chifley Research Centre or Menzies House, which also enjoy tax deductibility but seem unlikely to face the same scrutiny advocated by Hawke."
• The triple crisis of sociology -  Ivan Szelenyi at Contexts: "Sociology is indeed in a triple crisis. It responds the wrong way to “scientific” challenge coming from neo-classical economics and rational choice political science. It either imitates them or moves into trendy interdisciplinary fields just to regain its lost constituency." Also check out Ivan's Foundations of Modern Social Theory lectures. I didn't know he taught at Flinders University in the 70s. My, that Hungarian accent seems hard to shake off.
• Shorter - Cory Doctorow at Locus Online: "My experience contrasts with the moral panic over the decline in writ­ing standards due to the Internet. Those who wring their hands at the informality and vernacular of instant messaging and social media prose have missed the point: when we practice writing short, for an audience, as a kind of performance, it makes us better writers"

This week, I have been mostly sick as a dog. I might have read the following, though it could all have been a delusion brought on by fever and lack of sleep:

• Using Wikipedia: a scholar redraws academic lines by including it in his syllabus - Ellis Jones at the Conversation: Hooray! And well, d'uh. But mostly hooray!
• First we take Amsterdam, then we take The Hague - Nicholas Vrousalis, Robin Celikates, Johan Hartle, and Enzo Rossi: "On April 1, representatives of staff and students from the occupied Maagdenhuis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) came to an agreement with the University’s Executive Board (CvB) concerning the formation of two independent committees, one to investigate UvA’s finances and another to investigate possibilities for decentralization and democratization."
• Students, Solidarity Strikes and Shutting Down Austerity at the Point of Production: The Social Vision of the 2015 Quebec Student Strike - Jonathan Leavit, Toward Freedom: "Bela recounts how inside his organizing conversations, technical education students were skeptical about organizing around education, because their programs are already commodified, privileging market demands over educational outcomes. 'If you tell them, well, you won’t have any kindergarten. You will have to stay at home or your partner will have to stay at home. What kind of society do you want? Then they’re ready to strike.'"
• Time Is Money Is Work Is Virtue - Colette Shade at the Baffler: "The iPhone has allowed office workers to be available anywhere, at any time. The Apple Watch is both a logical next step and a throwback to time measurement’s industrial origins."
• Warwick Uni to outsource hourly paid academics to subsidiary - Fighting Against Casualisation in Education
• The Automatic Teacher - Audrey Watters at boundary 2: "This does not mean, in any unfortunate sense, the mechanization of education. It does mean freeing the teacher from the drudgeries of her work so that she may do more real teaching, giving the pupil more adequate guidance in his learning. There may well be an ‘industrial revolution’ in education. The ultimate results should be highly beneficial. Perhaps only by such means can universal education be made effective."
• The Australian Sharia Lobby - John Quiggin: "The prospect of any significant legislation being based on Islamic sharia law seems pretty remote. On the other hand, those who claim to be concerned about sharia law (the Arabic term simply means ‘religious law) might want to consider the much more relevant issue of ‘sharīʿat al-Masīḥ’ (the Arabic term for ‘religious law of Christianity’)."
• The Big Chill: How Big Money Is Buying Off Criticism of Big Money - Robert Reich: "It’s bad enough big money is buying off politicians. It’s also buying off nonprofits that used to be sources of investigation, information, and social change, from criticizing big money. Other sources of funding are drying up. Research grants are waning. Funds for social services of churches and community groups are growing scarce. Legislatures are cutting back university funding. Appropriations for public television, the arts, museums, and libraries are being slashed."
• Dear Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is not, and should not be the internet - SavetheInternet.in coalition, Hindustan Times
• Yanis Varoufakis in conversation with Joseph Stiglitz on the Eurozone Crisis – at the INET-OECD conference, 9 April 2015 (video)
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Joe Hockey Blows Thought Bubbles On Housing Bubbles - the indispensible Ben Eltham at New Matilda: "The reason Australia has such a major housing affordability crisis is relatively simple. Our houses cost too much. A property bubble, driven by investors seeking capital returns, has inflated the price of Australian capital city housing well above its true value."
• The U.S. job skills mismatch and up-skilling - Nick Bunker, Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "New research […] looks at what happened to employer requirements for positions during the Great Recession and the resulting recovery. What they find is that an increasing supply of unemployed workers leads to an increase in the requirements for jobs that employers posted. With a larger pool of talent to pick from, employers get to pick the cream of the crop."
• Applauding Themselves to Death - George Monbiot: "While almost all governments claim to support the aim of preventing more than 2°C of global warming, they also seek to “maximise economic recovery” of their fossil fuel reserves. (Then they cross their fingers, walk three times widdershins around the office and pray that no one burns it)."
• The Death of Blogs has been Greatly Exaggerated - Mark Thoma guest post at the Fiscal Times: "The reporting today on economic issues is so much better than it was […], and that is due in no small part to the interaction between reporters, the public, and academics willing to blog and put complicated, technical matters into terms that the general public can understand."
• Roosevelt’s money policy, 1933-1934 - Eric Rauchway, Crooked Timber: "He wanted to establish an international system of managed currencies, with an agreement that would allow them to remain stable for long periods, but adjustable in case of need – that was what he told the World Economic Conference at the end of summer 1933, and that was why it broke up – because other countries weren’t yet ready to join the US."
• Economists! Be more Marxist - Chris Dillow, Stumbling and Mumbling
• Don’t be surprised by Abbott’s comments about ‘lifestyle choices’ - Sydney's Christopher Mayes and Jenny Kaldor at the Conversation: "Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s claim this week that people living in remote communities were making a “lifestyle choice” that taxpayers shouldn’t be obliged to fund was not just the result of an unguarded moment. Rather, the phrase reveals an underlying view that social circumstances are the responsibility of individuals, rather than societies."
• Australian firm to assume Indiana Toll Road lease, pay $5.73 billion - South Bend Tribune: Rent seeking is now a major export earner! AU FTW!
• NSW can pay for the infrastructure it needs without privatisation - Frank Stillwell at the Conversation: "[T]here are viable alternatives. Indeed, in economic matters, there are always alternatives."
• Political philosophy now illegal in the UK - Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber: "Well, almost. The British government has just produced the guidance for its “Prevent” scheme for education, which aims to stop young people from being drawn into “extremism”."
• Blyth Devastates Congress' Approach to Budget - The Real News Network: Blyth absolutely nails it, in record time.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Benign and powerful: the contradictory language of metadata retention - Adam Henschke in the Conversation: 'More than mere inconsistency, these “rhetorical contradictions” are used to convince us that we needn’t worry about retention and use of metadata, but at the same time is absolutely necessary for our individual and national security.'
• The Right Thing to Do: Homeless edition - Ian Welsh: "Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street."
• Profits up, investment down: why it matters for low pay - James Meadway, New Economics Foundation Blog: "[UK] Wages have fallen since the crash in 2007. Profits (net surplus outside of the North Sea) have gone through the roof. If it’s not quite a zero-sum game, it starts to look very close to one. The recovery has been driven by consumer spending. With real wages falling, this has come from a rise in borrowing by households." Yay for the credit card welfare system! Also: Almost 80% of UK Self-Employed Workers Living in Poverty - Catherine Phillips, Newsweek. Having been in that situation, I can easily believe it.
• Talking Trash: High-Status Explanations for Watching Low-Brow TV - The Reading List, The Society Pages
• A negative interest rate world? Why? - Ian Welsh: "In the United States more than all the gains of the last “recovery” have gone to the top 10% (really the top 3% or so.)  There has limited broad based demand for new goods.  Luxury goods, investment art, and London and Manhattan real-estate do not scale.  Without widespread demand, opportunities for new businesses, with new employers, are limited."
• New Zealand Spies on Neighbors in Secret “Five Eyes” Global Surveillance - Ryan Gallagher at the Intercept: "Everything we do is explicitly authorized and subject to independent oversight." Oh. That's all right then.
• How Higher Education Perpetuates Intergenerational Inequality - Timothy Taylor: "The effects of these patterns on inequality of incomes in the United States are clearcut: higher income families are better able to provide financial and other kinds of support for their children, both as they grow up, and when it comes time to attend college, and when it comes time to find a job after college. In this way, higher education has become a central part part of the process by which high-income families can seek to assure that their children are more likely to have high incomes, too."