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The midterms and data centers

There is a whole lot that one might say about Tuesday's midterm elections . Let's see if I can come up with something more novel than most of the early coverage. My question is -- what if anything does the "blue wave" of Democratic victories tell us about the future creation of data centers, with their developmental and environmental costs and accordingly about the continued development of artificial intelligence in the United States?  In the Governor's race in Texas, Gina Hinojosa successfully made the unchecked expansion of data centers a central part of her campaign against Greg Abbott. She advocates a moratorium, and work toward stronger protections for electric and water utility rate payers.  This race was not alone in elevating data centers from a local development issue to a state-wide issue.  But since it involves TEXAS, this race clearly suggests it has a future as a national issue, if Hinojosa herself can become an Ann Richards sized figure.  The Ohio Se...
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Plato: metaphysics and ethics

Gee, I thought this was obvious.  Why does it require elaborate argument at this point, millennia out?  What am I talking/asking about?  A new book by Lloyd P. Gerson called PLATO'S MORAL REALISM. Reviewed here: Plato's Moral Realism | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame    Gerson is affiliated with the University of Toronto and is a fellow in the Royal Society of Canada.  "Moral realism" in the title's usage includes any view to the effect that good and evil, right or wrong, are objective facts, independent of our perception of them, open both to knowledge and to reasoned discourse about that knowledge NOT subjective matters of opinion or emotive expressions like "boooo" or "yippee!" or anything of the sort. The NDPR review of Gerson's book paraphrases his key points this way, "Plato is a metaethical non-naturalist realist, and we isolate his normative theory from his metaphysics are our interpretiv...
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Referenda in Massachusetts

 Okay, I was being a bit coy in yesterday's entry.  I knew perfectly well that the Nov. 3 was the day of the mid-term elections for Congress in this Presidential cycle.  As a small part of that, in Massachusetts we had an unusual slate of referendum questions this year. There were nine of them.  The four I found of especial interest were: Question 2: would allow the public defenders in the state to form a union. I voted yes. Question 3: Would adopt a "jungle primary" system for elections in the state.  I voted no. Question 7: Would push municipalities toward zoning reforms friendly toward "tiny homes" and  starter homes on small lots. I voted yes. Question 8: Would repeal marijuana legalization. I voted no.   I'm happy to say I was on the winning side as to each of these matters. I will be fascinated to see hiow or whether the consequences of question 7 come through at curb level.  Also, in connection with the change in partisan majority in t...
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Gee, let me look at a newspaper

 Might be something newsworthy happening today in the good old USA.  Hmmm, let me check... BTW, I love the fact that I more-or-less instinctively wrote about a "paper" in the headline of this post.  I'm going to keep the wording there, because I come from an era when a news paper  [not a curated collection of headlines on a tablet or phone screen] would sit on the front porch of a home each morning, and when this was a good affirmation of the middle-class status of the family inside.  Masses of people got most of their news from newspapers, which (especially in the broadsheet format) seemed like little encyclopedias. Such newspapers are nowadays, when they still exist at all, basically legacy operation run by parent companies that are putting their serious effort into social media wizardry. I'm old. But there IS something going on today... let me look at a paper. 
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Simmel (and pragmatism) about value

  This turns out to be our week for Georg Simmel's philosophy of money. Today: can his views be understood as converging with Jamesian pragmatism?   Let us look again at the passage of Simmel's that I have been particularly discussing this week. "It is true that every value that we experience is a sentiment but what we mean by this sentiment is a significant content which is realized psychologically through the sentiment yet is neither identical with it nor exhausted by it.  Obviously, this category lies beyond the controversies about the subjectivity or objectivity of value, because it denies the relation of a subject that is indispensable for the existence of an 'object'."  That comment may have seemed mysterious at first.  I believe that I cleared it up yesterday when I put it into the context of the "objective value versus subjective value" dispute of his day about the foundations of economics.  To the extent the dispute was ever resolved by econ...
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A long delayed translation and some context

  I posted a thought about the Georg Simmel's book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY, published in Germany by Duncker and Humblot in 1900.  Today I'll add a bit about how that book came to be in English -- indeed, in American English -- where I can read it with ease. As distinct from the slog that getting through actual German would be for me, despite my two years of High School German classes!   The book began as a lecture delivered by Simmel in 1889 to a political science seminar at the University of Berlin, a seminar over which Gustav Schmoller presided.  Simmel then issued a series of articles on the underlying issue and the book emerged in due course. The first English translation?  It didn't happen until more than three quarters of a century later, a full 89 years since that first lecture  -- it was in 1978, brought out by Routledge, translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby.  There have been more recent editions. But ... why the long delay?...
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Georg Simmel

  I've written a few posts here about my theory of a recent but receding golden age in philosophy, the period roughly from 1880 to 1920.   Consider this comment an addition to that line of thought.  I have been reading a book by Georg Simmel (1858 - 1918), a German philosopher within the neo-Kantian movement of the late nineteenth century.  The book that drew my particular interest is his PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY [Philosophie des Geldes] published in 1900, squarely in the middle of the golden age I've postulated. I will introduce the book here, and in tomorrow's post I hope to come at it from a different angle.  The first thing that one has to know about Simmel's philosophy of money is that it is NOT a theory of economic value in the manner of Ricardo or Marx. Simmel was about 25 when Marx died -- he was of a later generation but within the same broad Germanic tradition. Still, he was not doing economic theory in the way Marx was. He was doing epistemology, appl...
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