• Amsterdam cracks down on prostitution, cannabis: lessons for Victoria? « Robertrandall’s Weblog

  Rob blogged about Amsterdam’s re-think of its liberal laws regarding drug use (and prostitution, too). I left a *long* comment, a thinking-out-loud about how the factory system of education, coupled with a repression of creative risk-taking and innovation in the culture, enables and exacerbates turning to drugs.  (note: I created a separate blog post about this here)

  tags: robert_randall, drugs, socialcritique, drug_addiction, education, innovation, risk, youth, comments

• “Legalization of Drugs: The Myths and the Facts,” by Robert L. Maginnis – Annotated

  Maginnis marshals arguments against the legalization of drugs. First, he presents arguments from all sides (pro & con), but then skewers what he defines as the 8 myths around the alleged benefits of legalization. His bottom line: drugs do harm and cause social disorder, and since “There is no ‘civil right’ to do what is wrong or harmful to yourself, your family, or your society,” there isn’t a convincing argument to be made for proceeding to accept drug use through legalization. (Note: Maginnis is a member of the Family Research Council, a “a Christian right non-profit think tank and lobbying organization” formed in 1981. See this page; eewww….)

  tags: legalization, drug_addiction, social_disorder

• Worldchanging: DIYcity Challenge: Build a Rideshare Program that Works

  QUOTE
  [DIY city]’s second challenge, issued earlier this week, asks participants to “conceive of a grassroots ridesharing system that can overcome the problems inherent in ridesharing and achieve critical mass.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: diycity, worldchanging, twitter, carshare, transportation, infrastructure, cities, collaboration

• Extracting Value From Free | PSFK

  Can’t sell copies of anything anymore if it’s easy to make copies. So what’s left? “[Kevn Kelly] sees the solution to this conundrum hinging on being able to identify qualities that themselves can’t be copied and believes we must do this from the perspective of a user. Kelly refers to these as “generatives” – things that are better than free.”

  tags: psfk, kevin_kelly, capitalism, economics, web_2.0

• How To Be a 21st Century Capitalist – Umair Haque

  Haque makes a case similar to Natural Capitalism‘s – if you capitalize what’s currently expended (as a negative externality, say), you attach “real” value to it.

  Some interesting points/ questions, too:
  QUOTE:
  Capital deepening is the foundation of next-generation value creation. Why is capital deepening so important? The reason that capitalism can destroy the world is that most of the world doesn’t exist in an economic sense. And so when we capitalize rainforests, endangered species, community, the foregone opportunities of the poor, our own well-being – then they will finally have value: they can finally be priced, and so the fatcats of the world won’t be free to destroy them with impunity.
  (…)
  Today’s so-called capitalists are anything but: mostly, they’re charlatans, impostors, and poseurs. But today’s most radical innovators are revolutionary, ironically enough, because they are learning to be genuine capitalists once again – capitalists in the 21st century sense of the word. They are discovering how to create value by growing new resources composed of social, natural, human, and cultural capital. By doing so, they are pumping new blood into capitalism’s failing heart.
  UNQUOTE

  The bit on capital being a consensus is also thought-provoking.

  tags: umair_haque, capitalism, economics

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 12|14|08 at 2:31 am. Filed under: links.

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