I've never heard the term _divulgadores_ (I don't speak Spanish, so that's no surprise), but it sounds maybe like "science communicator" in this context? There's something a bit more to the people you've listed in that they are also entertainers, not straight educators, I don't know if that's wrapped up in divulgadores as well?
It comes from the word "vulgar", meaning "common", like vulgus, the common people, for whom Jerome wrote the Vulgate (since they didn't read Greek or Hebrew). English "divulge" is a cognate, but as in many cases, the English word has experienced larger meaning shifts than Spanish. (Pidgins commonly have high rates of change.) The image I have is something like someone coming down from the ivory tower to bestow the blessings of their wisdom upon the jostling masses teeming without.
Yes, straight educators are not generally considered divulgadores; if someone is teaching a university class on linear algebra, that doesn't make them a divulgador. Unfortunately https://dle.rae.es/divulgar is not very helpful, but https://www.etymonline.com/word/divulge gives a bit of the flavor.
Hmm interesting, thank you! It sounds a bit like "vernacular design" used to kind of mean "design and manufacturing done by the common people" to meet simple needs rather than overly fancy mass-manufactured objects. "Vernacular" kind of means "the local language".
If you're interested in learning about this kind of navigational knowledge, about how Pacific Islander sailors could hop from island to island over the horizon without maps, I recommend reading The Last Navigator. It is also an interesting story told in the first person by the author going to learn the art of navigation and observing a culture being pushed aside.
Crudely, we would say "don't shit where you eat". I've heard from the early (as in, 80's) hacking days some of the people in the US would never hit targets in their own state, as there wasn't good federal-level enforcement nor inter-state collaboration. Of course that would backfire today because you're immediately commiting crimes across state lines...
And it's a good model I think, to take some responsibility for public property. Not just "your sidewalk", as in the sidewalk that touches your private yard, but also "your street", "your town center", and "your local parks". I'm not interested in hearing about if it's "your job" or "your trash", if there's a situation you are unhappy about, and you can directly impact it, why not do so?
I live in Oakland, CA, just off a major street. When I moved into this place I got annoyed at the litter on the street, until I eventually just started picking it up. The first day, I filled a trash bag travelling just 100ft along the sidewalk. A week later I would fill a trash bag every two or three laps of the entire street. Now I think I fill one trash bag per week. And I just feel better looking at, walking, or biking down my street, and I've gotten good conversations with neighbours to boot.
Culturally, right now, people will keep on littering on American city streets, and you and I aren't equipped to change that. It takes surprisingly little effort to carve out a considerably improved space though, and I find that when I consider it a gift to my neighbourhood and a constant task fighting against entropy (rather than something that can be "finished"), it's easier.
("you" in this context is a general "you", and not meant to be singling another_story out, of course)
I pick up litter when out in nature, because I don't think anyone but me will pick it up. In a city like San Francisco there's a multi-billion dollar budget and a sanitation department that tax payers pay for so that they won't have to do it themselves.
It's ridiculous to pay taxes and then be told to clean street trash if you don't like it.
Yup. There are doggie bags on my pack despite the fact I've never owned a dog. There's also a larger trash bag in the pack in case I encounter larger stuff and am in a position to bring it out. (I only pick up larger stuff if I'm not going to be making much more use of my poles. Otherwise it's just too much of a pain handling a trash bag and my poles.)
This idea that a lot of money is involved therefore every imaginable need must be fully covered is extremely dangerous and unreasonable. Just one example of how this goes is residents have pushed the City to take responsibility for trimming of all street trees which used to be the responsibility of property owners. The result is a lot of trees either ignored or hacked to death by untrained workers in a hurry. Large amounts of money are not infinite amounts of money and still have to be carefully managed in order to get good results and make reasonable trade offs.
And yet that is completely unrealistic. The City currently funds weekly teams clearing out all the most troubled areas and that costs a fantastic amount up front as well as competing for increasingly precious landfill space. Defining the job of public works to be picking up all the trash that veritable armies of homeless generate does not make that job possible. You are absolutely and undeniably using your imagination to balance a spreadsheet that is a complete mess and that is not working and will never work.
Well the “armies of homeless” are also a public policy failure. If the homeless policy across the 50 largest American cities was identical, there would not be so many homeless in SF.
> Only founder led companies and family owned businesses can stand up to the immense pressure from the dogmas of modern finance.
How about worker-owned companies, co-operatives, and collectives? I totally agree the problem is that with the finance people steering the ship there's incentives to push up your short-term performance and collect bonuses and watch your publically-traded stock value go up. So don't go public; use the value an organization creates to pay the people in it, and invest in making it better for those people and the people you serve. The people who have say in the decisions are the ones who are most interested in having the organization continue to be healthy and a good place to work.
There are other ways. We don't even need to imagine them, they've already happened. We just need to resist the siren song of the lottery ticket and instead try to create systems and organizations that we want to be a part of.
The fact that there are so few of these types of company around probably means that they have trouble surviving in a world where the competition is supported by modern finance.
> they have trouble surviving in a world where the competition is supported by modern finance
The problem with coöperatives is longevity. We have white-collar coöps of sorts: partnerships. They tend to disintegrate after a generation or become quasi-corporations over time because immortal entities can make plans and promises on time scales that ones that grow old and change priorities and die can't.
Can you have a cooperative with limited liability? I'm sure you can emulate it with a limited company and particular arrangements of stock ownership and voting rights, but I doubt that's easy or cheap to set up.
The John Lewis Partnership in the UK is a public limited company whose shares are entirely owned by a trust that pays shares of profits to all of its employees, which isn't quite "ownership" but close, and they have a $15bn revenue. Publix Super Markets in the US has a $45bn revenue and is privately owned with all employees receiving stock.
Financing is probably an issue at a certain level but it doesn't seem to be limiting otherwise. They're just unusual, although if you consider startups giving employees a stake isn't that strange today.
> Can you have a cooperative with limited liability?
Yes, in the US, at least.
A coop can be a corporation or LLC (and a coop that is either the former or the latter when taxed as a corporation has special tax status with the IRS, under subchapter T, so occasionally they are referred to as “T corps” analogous to C or S corps.)
An S-Corp is the structure made for that sort of spread to a limited number of stakeholders. Not to say it's viable in some states with current regulation.
Also, LLP is a limited liability partnership. Wholly state entity, though, so the same caveat again. Member limits, etc.
And that's the USA of course. Your country may vary.
This is something that is interesting to me, I have been reading about various ideas for worker owned companies. Some friends and I have been talking about how we might organize a side business built around a similar structure and where it might fail for reasons that are not just the business side of things.
> Paying the lowest price you possibly can nearly always means someone along the way was exploited
No, I agree with that. But that's still engaging in charity, right? Voluntarily paying more for something that I could pay less for, so that artists will have a living wage, workers won't be exploited, etc etc.
Your "sustain something you want to see continue to exist" suggests something else, though. What it suggests is that I have a good practical reason, on the basis of wanting to see good music continue to be created, to personally pay more for music. I think this is incorrect.
If I was of the opinion that only a few artists made really great music, it might make sense to exclusively fund them so that they would continue doing so. But that's not the case: music is an extremely cheap commodity these days, because high quality production is so easy (can even be done with free or cheap software on an old laptop). There's enough good music put out there for free by people just doing it as a hobby to last a lifetime. You can't compete with that; a "fair share" of nothing is still nothing. Similar problem for Uber drivers: when there are too many drivers, the cost per ride gets driven through the floor. That's true regardless of whether Uber are exploiting their drivers (they probably are).
I was evasive in my original reply, so let me put my cards on the table. I do think that voluntarily paying more for something than it is worth (its fair market price) is charity. And I don't think it is practicable to fix the problems with artist remuneration by encouraging everyone to be charitable. And I think it's a bit ludicrous to try to commandeer the word "fair" to mean something other than the market price, if you're not going to reconsider the more fundamental assumptions behind having a market in the first place.
I would argue that if you want music to flourish, in something like its present democratized form, you need to do just that. Music should be understood as a human good - both creating and listening to it. All music is good, even bad music. All musicians should be supported, even those whose music wouldn't be popular enough to earn a living wage at the market price. Recall that even the Beatles were supposedly on the dole at one point.
On the other hand, we could decide that music is simply not all that valuable to us, that creating more music than anyone can reasonably consume does not promote any particular human good, and let the current proliferation of music die. That's also a valid outcome. What isn't valid, to my way of thinking, is valuing music and then thinking that charity ought to be our way of responding to that value.
What you are calling charity (which also lumps in patronage since patrons don't pay "fair market prices") is precisely how music has been funded for hundreds of years and how classical/orchestral music continues to survive today. No one funds opera houses or gets their name on one of the bricks because they think it's a smart business decision or a fair market transaction. It will hopefully continue to be a big part of the equation going forward, I think a whole community being able to see live orchestral music based on the generosity of a few is a good thing that should continue.
Your whole comment is somewhat baffling to me as you decry "charity" or anything not based in free-market economics as "not the way" but provide little in the way of specifics on what should be done, other than that we should "reconsider the more fundamental assumptions".
Here's the fundamental assumption being reconsidered: the idea that the only value the consumer derives from a product is the direct first-order utility or pleasure they get from using the product. Let me put it this way: there's a market for "free trade" coffee that is more expensive than regular coffee. Is that charity? I don't think so, instead I think it recognizes that there is actual economic value in the consumer's personal satisfaction or belief that they are purchasing something sustainable, that they can feel good about. Call it charity if you want, but it is a very real economic force.
> is precisely how music has been funded for hundreds of years and how classical/orchestral music continues to survive today
You're quite right about this. That's why it's important that I'm strongly of the view that the economic realities of music making have changed. The difference is that now a vastly larger number of people are making music, because technology has made this possible, and individual pieces of music are reaching vastly larger audiences, thanks to the "free-copy" effect of files.
If the goal were to preserve music (the cultural institution of music) exactly as it has existed for hundreds of years, your approach (patronage) would be sufficient. This is what I meant when I said that we could just conclude that making and consuming music aren't values as such. As long as there's enough music to go around, as much as anyone needs, then that's enough and we should not make any more. In other words, this is the view that concludes that the market is right, that it has accurately priced in the way we value (or don't value) music. Individual compositions and performances are intrinsically fungible.
My view is that we have larger possibilities. That the democratization and wide-scale production of music, even too much music, is itself an expression of a human good and that it makes sense for a society to support it for that reason, even though it is incapable of generating profits that would pay for itself. My point is that this huge over-production of music is something that cannot, like the music of the past, be paid for by individual acts of charity. That was something that only worked when there was only a certain amount of "good" music that needed to be sustained.
I believe that most people who listen to music instinctively embrace part of my view (that music is a human good as such), but are trapped into thinking that the only way in which "fair" and "unfair" can be assessed is in the commodity price of the work. I'm trying to show that this is incoherent: if whatever the market says is the value of music is the end of the story, then most music is simply not valuable and you get something like the present hierarchy of artists, with a handful of multimillionaires at the top and a majority making almost nothing at the bottom. You can't bypass that by trying to force the idea of a "fair share of value" into our current system for determining values, which is simply incompatible with that.
Edit: let me spell out something that may be unclear about my view. Part of what I'm getting at is that there is an enormous gap between "fair market value + charity" (as I would have it) or "fair market value, including the value of fair remuneration" (as you would have it) and meeting the actual material needs of most artists. Even the most expansive view of "fair trade music", or whatever, is not going to say that individual people should be paying more than $20 an album or so. The market value of a work of art cannot be taken to automatically contain the necessary remuneration to ensure that the creator earns a living wage through their work. To wish that it did is to wish that market prices ceased to function as prices.
So even on the most wishful version of "fair" payment under a market pricing scheme, the vast majority of artists won't be paid enough (where "enough" is read in the intuitive way I have in mind that reflects the real human value inherent in creating music). We can either be okay with that, and say that the current system (with a few adjustments, perhaps) is fine, or we can say that some human goods that cannot be priced into a free market are also worth achieving.
I'm not in the field, but on page 13 you can see that there's a considerable difference in effectiveness against infection, but not against hospitalization (at least not yet). It's suggested that the recent changes in effectiveness are due to the Delta variant becoming prevalent.
On page 15 there's a table with actual numbers from Minnesota. Drawing from similarly-sized pools of otherwise similar cohorts, they counted outcomes. Look at the bottom half, which covers people (in the vaccinated cohorts) who are considered "fully vaccinated" (14+ days since their second dose). So yeah, breakthroughs with Pfizer might be roughly twice as high, but "hospitalization or worse" is still 1/8th as likely as unvaccinated, and when you're looking at ICU admissions, Pfizer has had 2 and Moderna 1, so... small numbers make it hard to really compare.
But look at that bottom row. 0 deaths for anybody vaccinated.
Well the demo is live, it's linked right there and you could try it.
I did, and after typing in the left-parens inside the already existing left-parens, tylr gave me a right-parens in the "backpack", the space above where I was typing, and then didn't let me move outside of the enclosing parens pair (ie, I had to "put down" the matching right-parens to either enclose the 2, or the 2,3 pair). If instead I put in the left-parens before the already existing one, tylr automatically added the right-parens after the existing right-parens (which makes sense, it's the only legal place for the left-parens I just added to be matched).
That's kind of cool. It would also be nice if hitting ( after selecting an expression would wrap it in ()s, if it is syntactically correct to do so. That's the first thing I tried.
Yup, these kinds of things are definitely on the agenda as we integrate the core ideas here into Hazel. We kept things minimal in Tylr to focus on the core ideas with minimal "magic".
