Time to open up waste collection to proper competition I’d say.

These people are your servants not your masters.

Jock Coats writes in Refuseniks (http://jockcoats.me/refuseniks), objecting to the council trying to maintain city-wide standards of service for rubbish collection. He says, with some contempt, that “These people are your servants not your masters” and, like a late ’80s follower of Milton Friedman says, “Time to open up waste collection to proper competition I’d say.”

Now, I am not going to defend every actual instance of the implementation of social contracts. Maybe the council can do better. But, I am damn sure that I do want mutual, civic rubbish collection by civil servants earning a fair wage, working with the co-operation of citizens who recognise that their “servants” are human beings pushed to do more and more with less and less. We are all collectively arranging, through the council, to have our ridiculous quantities of rubbish disposed of in as safe and as sustainable manner as we can. Being a citizen is not just buying services and moaning. We all have our part to play. One part is agreeing that sometimes it is better for all if one or another of us adapts their behaviour, such as by being reasonable and civil in how and when we package our waste for collection.

The middle class, to the detriment of the excluded, happily privatise services such as security (private security guards, alarms and CCTV services), health (BUPA etc) and education instead of funding the common-wealth through taxation. After private bin men, what next? Private fire departments? Come on, Jock. Bill Maher has a good rant at this in the Huffington Post, here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-not-everything-i_b_244050.html

If the service is “opened up to competition” who will service the third of the city that live in the “regen arc” along the eastern ring road? Are you arguing for poor services for poor people? Do we want random bin lorries chuntering down East Oxford’s narrow streets every day of the week because one person would prefer their rubbish collected on Tuesday and another on Friday?

Equality pays off. Inequality in society makes life worse for all, and – as you would expect – those on the lower end of the scale get a disproportionately worse deal than those at the top. See http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about and my recent post http://rworld2.posterous.com/the-equality-trust

the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis. The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nano­technologies—each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we’re still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.

I have not the faith in the “Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds” that Jamais Cascio has. I still prefer to rely on Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.” She concludes:

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

We believe that in order to gain substantial improvements in the real quality of life of the populations of developed countries it is necessary that differences in income and wealth are greatly reduced.

OK, so we joke about how we have the randiest teenage liggers in Europe, can out-belch the Belgians and who would want perfect teef anyway? But inequality in society makes life worse for all, and – as you would expect – those on the lower end of the scale get a disproportionately worse deal than those at the top. The Thatcherite monetarist nostrum that, “… a rising tide floats all the boats…” is not true. To keep the metaphor, there is now very good evidence in Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (Penguin 2009), that lower tides and longer mooring lines are what we need.

DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

Strikes me this is a route worth following for anyone interested in contemporary epistemological questions.

Faviki is a tool that brings together social bookmarking and Wikipedia. It lets you bookmark web pages using Wikipedia’s terms. In Faviki, everybody uses the same names for tags from the world’s largest collection of knowledge!

I do think this is a neat idea, addressing one of the big problems of folksonomies. In part it goes some way towards addressing my quibbles with restricted vocabularies. Faviki uses DBpedia as its underlying taxonomy. So, yes, there is restriction and structure, but this evolves with use and the restricting/structuring system is – to some extent – open.

My only problem with Faviki is that I do not want to move my bookmarks and social bookmarking groups over to it. I want Diigo (and Posterous – are you listening?) to do the same. Posterous really should allow you to tag posts in the “Share on Posterous” bookmarklet.