McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 2nd 2020

• How to help someone use a computer. Words of wisdom. Worth applying to other related teaching avenues too, it reminds me of the good examples of fixing I see at the DoES Liverpool Repair Cafes: where the person with the broken item fixes it themselves, with help from the expert, rather than stood to one side watching the expert fix it for them.
• In The Eternal Inferno, Fiends Torment Ronald Coase With The Fate Of His Ideas. "Carillion consisted, essentially, of a sales and contract management organisation that hunted public-sector service contracts and then hired subcontractors to carry them out." Metcalfe's law is great when you apply it to the number of people with phones in your phone network, or how many computers are connected to the Internet; it's terrible when you're counting the number of entities contracting between each other to deliver something. This is why we need to rid so many areas of our life of marketisiation and financialisation - not (just) because it's not a humane way of arranging affairs, but because it doesn't work!