September 27, 2015
A protection racket is a scheme whereby a group provides protection to businesses or other groups through violence outside the sanction of the law. Through the credible threat of violence, the racketeers deter people from swindling, robbing, injuring, sabotaging or otherwise harming their clients. Protection rackets tend to appear in markets where the police and judiciary cannot be counted on to provide legal protection, either because of incompetence (as in weak or failed states) or illegality (black markets).
Protection rackets are often indistinguishable in practice from extortion rackets since, for the latter, there will be an implied threat that the racketeers themselves may attack the business if it fails to pay for their protection. In an extortion racket, the racketeers agree simply to not attack a business. In a protection racket the criminals agree to defend a business from any attack. Conversely, extortion racketeers will have to defend their clients if threatened by a rival gang to avoid the client transferring their allegiance.
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September 24, 2015
Rent-seeking is attempting to take advantage of a pre-existing resource without improving it. According to Nobel Laureate economist Robert Shiller the classic example is that of a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee (or rent of the section of the river for a few minutes) to lower the chain. There is nothing productive about the chain or the collector. The lord has made no improvements to the river and is helping nobody in any way, directly or indirectly, except himself. All he is doing is finding a way to make money from something that used to be free.
An example of rent-seeking in a modern economy is spending money on political lobbying for government benefits or subsidies in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created, or to impose regulations on competitors, in order to increase market share.
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September 21, 2015
Trigger warnings are disclaimers that content contains strong writing or images which could unsettle those with mental health difficulties. Angus Johnston, a history professor at the City University of New York, said that trigger warnings can be a part of ‘sound pedagogy,’ noting that students encountering potentially triggering material are ‘coming to it as whole people with a wide range of experiences, and that the journey we’re going on together may at times be painful. It’s not coddling them to acknowledge that. In fact, it’s just the opposite.’
However, students at UC Santa Barbara passed a resolution in support of mandatory trigger warnings for classes that could contain potentially upsetting material. Professors would be required to alert students of such material and allow them to skip classes that could make them feel uncomfortable.
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September 18, 2015
Colonel Tom Parker (1909 – 1997), born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, was a Dutch-born American entertainment impresario known best as the manager of Elvis Presley. Parker’s management of Presley defined the role of masterminding talent management, which involved every facet of his life and was seen as central to the success of Presley’s career.
‘The Colonel’ displayed a ruthless devotion to his own financial gain rather than his client’s interests and took more than the traditional 10 to 15 percent of his earnings (reaching up to 50 percent by the end of Presley’s life). Presley said of Parker: ‘I don’t think I’d have ever been very big if it wasn’t for him. He’s a very smart man.’ For many years Parker falsely claimed to have been US-born, but it eventually emerged that he was born in Breda in the Netherlands.
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September 16, 2015
The smart cow problem refers to the fact that when a group of individuals is faced with a technically difficult task, only one of their members has to solve it. When the problem has been solved once, an easily repeatable method may be developed, allowing the less technically proficient members of the group to accomplish the task.
The concept is relevant to copyright protection schemes such as DRM (Digital Rights Management), where, due to the rapid spread of information on the Internet, it only takes one individual’s defeat of a DRM technology to render the method obsolete. The term ‘smart cow’ is thought to be derive from the expression: ‘It only takes one smart cow to open the latch of the gate, and then all the other cows follow.’
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September 14, 2015
Cowboy diplomacy is a term used by critics to describe the resolution of international conflicts through brash risk-taking, intimidation, military deployment, or a combination of such tactics. It is criticized as stemming from an overly-simple, dichotomous world view. Overtly provocative phraseology typically centralizes the message.
One of the earliest known applications of the term was in 1902, when it was used by Jackie Lawlor from Westford, Massachusetts and the American press to describe Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policies. Roosevelt had at the time summarized his approach to international diplomacy as ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick,’ an adage that was engraved on a bronze plaque on Donald Rumsfeld’s office desk in the Pentagon and has set the modern precedent. The term has since also been applied to the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
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September 9, 2015
The Overton window is the range of ideas the public will accept. It is used by media pundits and particularly favored in conservative and libertarian discourse.
The term derives from its originator, Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market think tank. Overton described six degrees acceptance of an idea: Unthinkable, Radical, Acceptable, Sensible, Popular, and Policy.
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September 8, 2015
A predictable surprise describes a situation or circumstance in which avoidable crises are marginalized in order to satisfy economic and social policies. The term was popularized by Harvard Business School professors Max H. Bazerman and Michael D. Watkins who defined ‘predictable surprises’ as problems that: at least some people are aware of, are getting worse over time, and are likely to explode into a crisis eventually, but are not prioritized by key decision-makers or have not elicited a response fast enough to prevent severe damage.
These problems tend to require a significant investment in the near term that will not pay off until later. This could involve changes to established organization culture and/or changes that competing interests do not benefit from. Frequently cited examples include the Iraq War, Enron, the subprime mortgage crisis, the Hurricane Katrina response, global warming, and the Catholic sex abuse scandal.
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August 29, 2015
Stewart Brand (b. 1938) is an American writer, best known as editor of the ‘Whole Earth Catalog,’ a counterculture magazine and mail order catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL (one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation), the Global Business Network (a scenario planner and forecaster for companies, NGOs, and governments), and the Long Now Foundation (a nonprofit that promotes very long-term projects, e.g. a 10,000 year clock). He is the author of several books, most recently ‘Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.’
Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy. He studied biology at Stanford University, graduating in 1960. His first marriage was to Lois Jennings, an Ottawa Native American and mathematician. As a soldier in the Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he later expressed the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing. A civilian again in 1962, he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD, in Menlo Park, California.
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August 22, 2015
The moral credential effect is a bias that occurs when a person’s track record as a good egalitarian establishes in them an unconscious ethical certification, endorsement, or license that increases the likelihood of less egalitarian decisions later. This effect occurs even when the audience or moral peer group is unaware of the affected person’s previously established moral credential. For example, individuals who had the opportunity to recruit a woman or African American in one setting were more likely to say later, in a different setting, that a job would be better suited for a man or a Caucasian.
Moral credentials can also be obtained vicariously (i.e., a person may behave as if they themselves have moral credentials after observing someone from a group they identify with making an egalitarian decision). In research that draws on social identity theory it was also found that group membership moderates the effectiveness of moral credentials in mitigating perceptions of prejudice (e.g., displays of moral credentials have more effect between people who share in-group status). In 1878, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of ‘innocent corruption’ in ‘Human, All Too Human’: ‘In all institutions that do not feel the sharp wind of public criticism (as, for example, in scholarly organizations and senates), an innocent corruption grows up, like a mushroom.’
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August 8, 2015
Extraterrestrial real estate is land on other planets or natural satellites or parts of space that is offered for sale. No such sale has ever been recognized by any authority. Nevertheless, some private individuals and organizations have claimed ownership of celestial bodies, such as the Moon, and are actively involved in ‘selling’ parts of them through certificates of ownership termed ‘Lunar deeds,’ ‘Martian deeds,’ or similar sham legal documents.
The topic of real estate on celestial objects has been present since the 1890s. In 1936, A. Dean Lindsay made claims for all extraterrestrial objects. He sent a letter to the Pittsburgh Notary Public along with a deed and money for establishment of the property. The public sent offers to buy objects from him as well. The UN sponsored 1967 ‘Outer Space Treaty’ established all of outer space as an international commons by describing it as the ‘province of all mankind’ and forbidding all the nations from claiming territorial sovereignty.
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July 30, 2015
Battered person syndrome is a physical and psychological condition of a person who has suffered (usually persistent) emotional, physical, or sexual abuse from another person. The condition is the basis for the battered spouse defense that has been used in cases of spouses who have killed their abusers. The condition was first researched extensively by American psychologist Lenore E. Walker, founder of the Domestic Violence Institute, who used psychologist Martin Seligman’s ‘learned helplessness’ theory to explain why abused spouses stayed in destructive relationships.
The syndrome develops in response to a three-stage cycle found in domestic violence situations. First, tension builds in the relationship. Second, the abusive partner releases tension via misconduct while blaming the victim for having caused the event. Third, the abusive partner makes gestures of contrition, but does not find solutions to avoid another phase of tension building and release so the cycle repeats. The repetition of the cycle despite the abuser’s attempts to ‘make nice’ results in the abused partner feeling at fault for not preventing recurrences. However, since the victim is not at fault and the violence is internally driven by the abuser’s need to control, this self-blame results in feelings of helplessness rather than empowerment.
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