- Reading Paul Krugman’s Peddling Prosperity, I had a couple of insights. One was to revise my fairly uninformed and therefore negative opinion of economist N. Gregory Mankiw: Krugman helped me to see he’s a lot more insightful than some other folks, and I’m politically closer to some of his positions than I initially believed. (Yes, even though he’s a former Chair of the Board of Economic Advisors to Bush fils.) More importantly, though, Krugman helped me to stumble across the idiotically belated realization that information workers constitute a high-value market sector not because their work is inherently better, not because their skills are more in demand or somehow more valuable, but because of the high value of the capital inputs to their production: in other words, because computers-as-capital — as one of the factors of production — are expensive, their work is more expensive. For those who work with computers in education, disciplinary vanity leads us to think that it’s our labor as a factor of production that makes that production expensive/valuable, rather than the computer itself as a factor of production. Yeah, I know: like, duh.
- The abstract geometric tattoo on my right deltoid is almost old enough to vote, so I went and had it re-inked from faded, blurry blue to fresh, sharp black. Once again very happy with it. And I’ve got some new holes in my earlobes.
- Working on my Computers and Writing presentation, which I hope will make up one portion of my dissertation’s Chapter 5. It’s about identity, branding, commercialization, and weblogs, and somehow all my examples keep being about either Paris Hilton or the crew over at Wealth Bondage. I’ll have to see if I can run it by Dr. Chadwallah and company sometime in the next few days.
- Tink’s not been quite as fussy about her luxating patella lately, but now that the weather’s heating up, the girls are both shedding terribly, and Zeugma’s being a total mush in terms of needing affection, so the fur’s drifting all over me and all over the apartment. I brushed them both today, and by the time I was done, I had enough to knit myself a third cat. Like a fur golem.
- Two days ago was the two-year anniversary of my first post here.
Friday Miscellany
Happy belated blogiversary!
Yes, congratulations on your blog’s being two years old! Thanks for writing the more-than-few sentences about your diss as I can now put it in perspective. I’m finding that reading blogs like yours (and Clancy’s) has helped me get back into theory.
Regarding your golem-cat–go to Margo, Darling’s blog and check out the cats there. Me, I’m thinking about creating hairnets for cats, or at least Scotchguarding them for the nonce.