Category Archives: Politics

Politics

Margaret Thatcher on the Generals, Commissars & Mandarins

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On the Generals, Commissars & Mandarins
Thatcher disagrees with the view that peace is more certain with the slowing of progress on defensive technology. History has repeatedly demonstrated that deterrents are better means to that end. The atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example. Aggressors do not start wars because their adversary has built up his own strength they start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace. This is the fundamental defence analysis that Thatcher espouses. Regarding NATO, it is essential that the USSR fails in their attempt to drive a wedge between the US and its European partners (Britain most importantly). NATO must be united against the USSR in order to be effective against possible invasion from the East. NATO was no military threat for the USSR only a philosophical threat of freedom and justice. The Soviets were pressing to gain military advantage. Effective internationalism must be built on only strong nations. Global citizenry weakens the will of individuals to fight for their country. Agrees ion must always be firmly resisted.

On the Trident Purchase
Britain needed to retain its deterrent against USSR. The American Trident missiles served this purpose. The Trident deal did not allow Thatcher to turn the key (no duel key). She justifies this by stating that the cost of owning the missiles was too high and that the US would be best prepared in the event of nuclear attack to coordinate retaliation. Thatcher used her relationship with Reagan to secure a reasonable and equal deal for the Trident II missiles necessary for UK defence.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4a, Part 4b, Part 5
Politics

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Part II

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(I) The Race To The Bottom (continued)

You need to avoid the race to the bottom. Wikipedia is massive, popular, and built for free thereby destroying the Encyclopedia Britannica. No single person could have created Wikipedia. A team of hundreds of thousands have created it, in fact. But by breaking the development of articles into millions of one-sentence or one-paragraph projects, Wikipedia did not need to rely on a handful of well-paid experts but instead relies on a loosely coordinated massive group of knowledgeable people, contributing small slices to the whole.

CastingWords does transcription for less than fifty cents a minute. John Jantsch took an interview he did with Godin, and posted it to a site that uses a crowd as its labourers. For a few dollars, the site took the recordings of interview, chopped the audio into tiny bits, and parceled it to anonymous labourers who transcribed the interview in little sections. Less than three hours later, it was put back together and the typed transcript was delivered to John Jantsch. Here we see that Jantsch wins, and the transcribers lose. The factory is planned, controlled, and measured, it’s factory work because it is optimizing the productivity of a product. The automation of the jobs of the past has made it so that millions of people are underemployed. Bringing back the human touch is valuable to society.