Invitations and Becomings

This week in Crikey, Bernard Keane suggests a couple of different ways of tackling climate change as an economic problem (of stimulating a certain sort of investment). 

Chris Bertram has a lovely post over at Crooked Timber on having a second-order desire not to have your first-order desires satisfied all the time.

So, for example, I always want my football team to win, but if they were to win all the time it would be rather boring and I would lose interest in football. It is a condition for me to live the life of a happy football fan that they win, but not too much.

Ah, Chris. We can tell so much about ourselves by the kinds of examples we use! You see, the first thing that popped into my head was: "Yes, that's the difference between porn and burlesque."

There's a nice post over at distributedcreativity, describing some of the art being created to expose and criticize semantic capitalism. If you've never heard the term (I hadn't) this is a good first pass:

"One of the most interesting facts is that we have reached a situation
in which any word of any language has its price, fluctuating according
to the laws of the market." - Christopher Bruno

"Aussie musos plundered by pirates: ARIA award winners on Sunday night could lose more of their revenue to illegal downloaders"

So screamed the SMH this afternoon. The article reports on a survey claiming that 40% of internet users illegally download music costing the industry over $100 million a year. Those poor musos - we give them awards, but then steal their very source of income.