One of the really spot-on things to come over the past decade from the European left, and Mayday protesters in particular, was their focus on ‘precarity’ – the trend of work to move from big corporations towards agencies, and freelancers, and short-term contracts. Acclaimed by many, with some justification*, as liberating workers from grey Fordist hierarchies, it is now leaving them high and dry without any security. Which, of course, was totally predictable – but it’s noteworthy that people did predict it, and devote their energies to campaigning around it**.
It’s a safe bet that precarious work – ranging from short-term contracts, through various degrees of informality, through to the outright illegal – is going to continue expanding across the economy in the next couple of years. There’s a strong argument that this is good and progressive, with informal work providing at least some safety net for the unemployed. Even the Wall Street Journal has been describing the informal economy as “
one of the last safe havens in a darkening financial climate
“.
Considerably more interesting, though, are the stories being collected by Robert Neuwirth. Neuwrith is one of desperately few people with a genuinely global outlook, and responsible for the excellent squatter city blog (and book). He’s now turning his attention to the informal economy.
Maybe it’s taking things to far to talk about informal work as being the poor’s best response to the collapse of capitalism, and to ask governments to find ways of accommodating the legally grey. Still, I prefer it to the usual assumption that the world’s poor should grow up to be obedient salarymen, and I have no doubt that Neuwrith will come out with a more nuanced version at some time in the future.
* I write all this as somebody self-employed, with minimal job security and few fallback plans, earning considerably less than I did when fully employed. I wouldn’t want it any other way, however tough things get through this recesssion. On the other hand, I can be relatively relaxed about all this because being a skilled worker my options are somewhat more appealing.
** Yes, this is me saying nice things about Hardt and Negri. Pay attention, it doesn’t happen often
Author: old_wp_importer
Protected: Rites of spring
there’s seditious libel, too
Apparently in addition to civil defamation laws (libel and slander), Britain has something called ‘criminal defamation’. This is a Bad Thing:
Proof of truth is a full defence to a civil defamation claim. The reason for this is fairly obvious: one should not be able to protect a reputation one does not deserve. Absurdly, those charged with criminal defamation must not only prove the truth of their statements, but also that publication was for the public benefit.
The law isn’t used much, and doesn’t get much attention. But according to Richard Ingrams, himself once charged with criminal defamation, it is “quite frequently used to prosecute people who wrote defamatory letters to the police, though such cases seldom received any publicity.”
Besides, rarely-used bad laws are in some respects worse than always-used bad laws, in that they give the authorities more powers to attack people they don’t like.
Now Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat MP, is trying to abolish the law, via an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which will be voted on on Monday. Given the minimal coverage (just Ingrams and a letter in The Times), and the fct that it’s being pushed by a single backbencher, I wouldn’t have held much hope for it getting anywhere. Except, Evan Harris was instrumental in getting rid of Blasphemous Libel last year.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of much I can do to support Harris’ amendment, given that the vote is on Monday and I live in the wrong country. Hence, writing about it here, in the vague hope that one of you will know more about me than the law (not a high bar), or have some idea what to do about it.
Untitled
Here is a nice, if oddly-titled, list of likely consequences of the recession:
5: Glory days for evangelicals
. Bad times are boon times for evangelical churches. Economist David Beckworth of Texas State University has crunched U.S. church attendance numbers and found that congregation growth at evangelical churches jumped 50 percent during each recession between 1968 and 2004.
[which I suppose means that the evangelical churches are
always
growing, recession or not
Maybe if the atheists sang more…]
Also, the weather seems to be marking the alleged start of Spring tomorrow, by carefully looking warmer than it is. I keep on opening the window, regretting it, then doing the same two hours later. I’ll never learn.
oh, and New Mexico has just abolished the death penalty
Protected:
Protected: [cambridge] Free Press tomorrow
Protected: Cambridge: choose me a pub
Protected: Cambridge
The Oxford English Dictionary, free
[
update:
Here
is a very rough interface, which will be improved whenever I next have some free time
]
Using the OED online costs £200/year, which is silly. Fortunately the first edition is out of copyright, and available at the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, it’s a bit tricky to find the right volume in a format that doesn’t expect you to download 200MB to look up a word. Djvu seems the best option; you need to install a browser plugin first, but then you can look at individual pages quite easily. Here are links to each volume:
A-B, C, D-E, F-G (pdf only) , H-K, L, M-N, O-P (flip-book only), Q-R, S-SH, SI-SU (flip-book only), SV-TH, TI-U, V-Z (flip-book only)
Other formats are at these links (yes, there are two separate scans, one from the University of Toronto and another from Kragen Sitaker):
- Volume 1, A-B: Sitaker
- Volume 2, C: Sitaker
- Volume 3, D-E: Toronto (partial), Complete?
- Volume 4, F-G: Sitaker, Toronto (no djvu for either)
- Volume 5, H-K: Sitaker
- Volume 6A, L:A Sitaker
- Volume 6B, M-NB (Sitaker)
- Volume 7, O-P: Toronto (flip-book only), Unlabelled (flipbook/pdf only)
- Volume 8A, Q-R: A – Sitaker
- Volume 8B, S-SHB – Sitaker
- Volume 9A, SH-SU: Sitaker.
- Volume 9B, SV-TH: Sitaker, Toronto
- Volume 10A, TI-U: Sitaker, Toronto
- Volume 10B, V-Z: Toronto, Sitaker
OED, again
A little more on the OED. The idea of creating a publicly-accessible version has obviously been floating around for a few years. As well it might: not only would an open OED be fantastically useful, but there’s a certain justice in bringing it back to the community. As Kragen Sitaker writes, the original OED
is one of the earliest instances of what are now called “pro-am” or
“commons-based peer production” projects. From 1857 to 1928, thousands
of readers collected examples of uses of words their dictionaries didn’t
define; they mailed these examples on slips of paper to a small number
of editors, who undertook to collate them into a dictionary.
Kragen’s attempt to liberate the OED was the most effective: not only did he get one set of the OED scanned, he also cooked up some code making it possible to look up individual words. Alas, his system is now offline – such is the fate of one-man projects. Rufus Pollock’s attempt to revive it, within the framework of the Open Knowledge Foundation, seems not to have got anywhere.
More ambitious are the Distributed Proofreaders, a group who take OCR’ed books, edit and correct them by hand, and pass them on to rProject Gutenberg. They’ve been contemplating the idea of tacking the OED for some time now. But it’s a pretty daunting project – both in scale, and in the complexity of the typography – and every attempt seems to peter out.
Which is all a bit of a disappointment. I’m not quite foolhardy enough to lauch myself into digitising the OED just yet, but there must be at least some prospect to make those scans slightly more user-friendly.