The extended quiescence of this 'blog has largely been an artefact of my limiting of various activities as I bore-down on critiquing Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, a work of heterodox political economy by Piero Sraffa. The task has been thoroughly unpleasant, because there is so very much wrong with his work and because he writes in an obscure manner. At the same time, I have been dealing with depression intensified by personal circumstances. Had I allowed myself to step away from the project more than I did, I might never have finished it.

I have not, indeed, finished it; but, on Wednesday morning, I completed a first draft of the article. That draft is now in the hands of some of the other economists whom I know. (Naturally, I have since found things that I want to change, though none of these represent a major issue.) So I think that I will be back to writing more entries here.

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One of the economists who has graciously said that he would take a look at the article (not-withstanding that it is monstrous in size!) asked me what motivated my writing of it.

Over many years, I have repeatedly been annoyed by encounters with those who draw upon PoCbMoC. More recently, I have been concerned by increased popular support for administrating economies (which support happens to be egalitarian or quasi-egalitarian); and this book is part of the infrastructure of the experts who defend such administration.

Further, at the time that I finally began actually working on this article, I felt stalled-out in my paper on the axiomata of qualitative probability. (That paper was and is a rat's nest, in which the basic propositions are not currently each perfectly orthogonal to all others.) In a sense, then, this article on Sraffa's book was intended as a break, though I quickly discovered that the task was going to be far more onerous than I had presumed.

Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is the central text of neo-Ricardian economics, and a core text of post-Keynesian economics; it is also an important source for a variant form of Marxism that would abandon the labor theory of value. If I can get my article published in a reputable journal, that publication will eventually be the death of neo-Ricardianism and of the aforementioned variant of Marxism; I don't know enough about post-Keynesianism to know how well they might do without PoCbMoC. Some of my criticisms are relatively minor, but some of them strike at the heart of the work.

(It took rather a long time to develop my article, but reading it offers the impression a nearly continuous rain of blows, some dreadful.)

I say eventually because I wouldn't expect the present admirers to acknowledge how hard they'd been hit, but I'd expect a virtual end to the winning of converts. I don't know that I can find a journal to publish the article because

• it is quite long;
• the mainstream of economists are unfamiliar with PoCbMoC so that
  • editors and reviewers may think it insufficiently significant, and
  • those reviewers most likely to feel sufficiently competent to examine my article are admirers of Sraffa.

I intend never again to pore over a work, even as short as PoCbMoC, when it is discernibly crack-pot. As I told a friend, I have been doing my time on the cross here; let someone else go after other such thinkers. I am capable of original work of significance, and that is how I intend to spend my remaining time qua economist.

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This 'blog was begun as I left LiveJournal, appalled by its evolving policies under its second and then third owners. One might reasonably conceptualize this 'blog as a continuation of that which I had at LJ, and some of the entries of this 'blog are recyclings of entries from the earlier 'blog.

None-the-less, this 'blog has become very different from its predecessor. LiveJournal is a social-networking site; part of the reason that it has withered is that its users migrated to more successful social-networking sites. My present 'blog doesn't work that way. I have recurring readers, but there's nothing much like the Friends feed of LJ or of Facebook. There is no centralized connector of interests (as on LJ). I have regular readers, but they are likely to use an RSS aggregator (such as Flipboard) and less likely to comment (especially if they are using such an aggregator). I get far more irregular visitors, who are here by way of Google (or of some other search service), grabbing some information, and not so much as visiting any page here other than their entry pages.

So it doesn't feel appropriate to offer mundanities of the sort that I would relate to a neighbor or to a friend on the telephone. My public entries tend to be things that I imagine strangers would appreciate reading. The restricted entries (basically accessible to friends who followed me as I migrated from LJ) are almost entirely personal; but a reader is required to make a special effort to access them, so they are not about ordinary events; they are usually very personal.

With entries to this 'blog thus typically requiring more thought, there are generally fewer of them, and the 'blog becomes dormant when I cannot — or believe that I should not — give thought to those entries.

The server on which this site is hosted is expected to be down for six hours, begining at 06:00 on 29 January UTC. (In parts of America, that interval begins in the night of 28 January.)

A number of visitors have pinned images from this site to their boards at Pinterest. These actions wouldn't bother me, except that I am very offended with the way that Pinterest attempts to compel visitors to log-into their site to look at boards, and to register an account even to contact them over an issue. Pinterest throws a mask between their content and a visitor (and have tweaked the coding of the mask to prevent its blocking).

I used to have a Pinterest account, but I walked away from it over the demand that I be logged-in to see what my then-girlfriend had pinned to her boards. I find now that Pinterest has the chutzpah to mask the specific set of images from this site pinned to the boards of various of their users.

(Pinterest can drive visits to a site. But I don't allow such concerns to determine the management of this site.)

In order to obstruct the pinning of images from this site to Pinterest, I have added the tag

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

to the headers of this 'blog. This obstruction is imperfect, but Pinterest uses Amazon Web Services, and I don't want to block everything else that does. Nor do I want the code for this 'blog to test each visit to see whether the Pinterest client is attempting to effect a pinning.

This morning, I discovered that a number of attempts in 2012, in '13, and in '14 to breach the security of this 'blog came from an IP number assigned to the Federal Reserve Board (132.200.32.34).

No, I don't think that Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen wanted to crack my site. Rather, I'm pretty sure that a Fed computer was itself cracked, and was operating as a 'bot, for years. 'Cause that's how our government rolls.

Some time within the next few days, I'll be testing a revision of the visual theme of this 'blog. Things may, at various intervals, get literally ugly. Please bear with me!

If-and-when the revision is completed, on some displays the look-and-feel of the 'blog may seem perfectly unchanged (though that won't quite be true); but, on wider displays, better use will be made of available space.

If you find that there is a persistent problem with the rendering of this 'blog, then please contact me! Please describe the problem clearly. And, as precisely as you practicably can, please tell me your

• device (eg, a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012),
• display-size in pixels (eg, 1024×768),
• operating system (eg, 64-bit Fedora Core 21, or 32-bit Windows 7 Starter),
• browser (eg, Opera 12.16)

(If you don't know some of that stuff, then just tell me what of it you do know.)

For now, I am concerned with how the 'blog is displayed on devices whose display-widths are at least 760 pixels. Later, I will attempt to address how the 'blog is rendered on the lower-resolution displays of some mobile devices.

[Up-Date (2015:05/10): The revised theme is now installed and selected. Again, please let me know if you have problems, and in such case please provide the information listed above.]

I wonder whether I'm engaged in soliloquy. Some people have accounts on this 'blog, allowing them access to restricted entries, but I don't know that anyone is actually logging-in and reading those entries.

Yester-day evening, I was using a publicly accessible WLAN to connect with the Internet. I found my access to this 'blog blocked by a Norton-branded product, which declared the 'blog to be pornographic.

Erotica really hasn't figured large in this 'blog. You can find the relevant entries with the tag erotica. I think that the two or three entries that caused Norton to damn this thing are specifically my entry of 2 July 2009, my entry of 26 March 2010, and perhaps my entry of 30 June 2010; the entry of 30 January 2011 may have weighed against me as well.

Of these, the entry of 2 July 2009 is the one that most likely set-off alarms. It contains an overtly erotic image (by Carolyn Weltman), and has a key-word of cunnilinctus.[1] Do a Google image-search using that key-word, and a link to that entry is currently the second returned. And, because of a couple of the other key-words in that entry, other images are also found, including one by Karel Šimůnek than many would regard as pornographic.

In the '50s, the drawings by Joe Shuster in the entry of 30 June 2011 would have been regarded as pornographic, though now the word pornography would typically be regarded as too strong. (Actually, a hundred years ago, many would have insisted that the picture in my entry of 2 February 2011 were pornographic, while now-a-days it could appear in a children's book without fuss.) Still, the text in that entry contains the term sado-masochistic and there are pictures, and Norton's classification was probably mediated with weak AI; indeed, once other flags were thrown, the appearance of the word dominatrix in a follow-up entry may have been seen as further PoP.

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Most WLANs that filter do so by way of a DNS table. When a browser seeks content located in terms of a URI or of a URL, and that specification includes a domain name, the domain name is converted to an IP number by way of a DNS table. By censoring the table that is used, the WLAN can block domains.

Some people subvert this censorship by way of a proxy server, which is no more than some site that will act as an intermediary; fetching content from the blocked domain. The obvious problem here is that the proxy may be identified and blocked as well.

A better subversion is to use a different table than whatever is being supplied by the WLAN. In particular, one may configure one's system to use DNS tables provided by Google, or perhaps by some other third party. But be alert that using an alternative DNS table may not be a good idea in other contexts. (For example, when using a subscription ISP that places quotas on content for most sites, but with exceptions.)

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[1]The words cunnilinctus and cunnilingus are synonymous in English and in some other languages; but in Latin cunnilinctus referred to the act, while cunnilingus referred to a performer of that act. The latter word acquired its more recent meaning as a result of incompetent posturing (something that has figured more than once in attempts to borrow foreign terms and phrases). Efforts to clean-up this particular mess have repeatedly failed, but I avoid participating in it, by using the word that is both proper English and proper Latin. Hence my use of the less common term.

Assuming that you do much surfing of the WWWeb, you've surely noticed that there are a great many sites that now require one to use an account with an external social-networking service in order to access functionality that previously would have been available without such an account. For example, to comment to some sites which are not themselves hosted on Yahoo! or on Facebook or on Google+, one must none-the-less log into an account with one of these services.

From the perspective of the site-owners, reliance upon such external services can reduce the costs of managing site-access. The external social networks provide this management partly as valued-added to their account-holders, but providing this service is a means of building a behavioral profile of those account-holders.[1] (To this day, most people do not assimilate the fact that most social-networking services exist largely as profiling services.) As you might expect, I feel that efforts to build such profiles should be resisted.

I understand both the problems of the client-sites instead independently managing access, and the difficulties of knowing just where to draw some objective line that would distinguish acceptable and unacceptable external services. (For example, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to require a verified e.mail account, and even to require a verified e.mail account from a service that is not black-listed. But, once one requires a verified e.mail account from a service that is white-listed, one may be pushing visitors into allowing themselves to be profiled (by an e.mail-service provider), if the white-list is overly constrained.)

What seems inexcusable to me is not simply handing access-control over to an external service, but handing it over exclusively to one external service that is a profiling service. The very worse case of such inexcusability is handing control over to the biggest of these services, Facebook, but it remains inexcusable to give exclusivity to any other external service (unless that service has some real guarantee against building profiles).

Which brings me to a policy change that I will be effecting for my own 'blog, not-withstanding that it has never required an external account to access its functionality.

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At this and some other sites, a list of implicitly or explicitly recommended links is provided, outside of the body of principal content. (With the present formatting of this 'blog, they are in a right-hand column.)

In the case of my own list, I will be removing (or refraining from providing) links whenever I discover that the only evident way to access those other sites or to comment to them is by using an account with exactly one external social-networking site.

For example, if a 'blog is not hosted on Facebook, but the only readily seen way to comment to it is by using a Facebook account, then I will not wilfully provide a link to it. I will continue to link to Facebook sites; I will continue to link to sites where the only readily seen ways of commenting use social-networking accounts, so long as accounts from more than one social network may be used.

This policy only applies to the sort of generalized recommendations represented by that list. I may continue to link within principal content to such things as news-stories at sites that are enabling such profiling.

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[1] I don't know that those handing access-management off to such services receive side-payments for doing so, but it wouldn't surprise me.

On Sunday, 27 May, I received a pair of e.mail messages announcing formal acceptance for publication of my paper on indecision, and I ceased being braced for rejection. From 15 June, Elsevier had a version for sale on-line (first the uncorrected proof, then the corrected proof, now the version found in the journal). The issue itself (J Math Econ v48 #4) was made available on-line on 3 August. (I assume that the print copies will be received by subscribers soon.)

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Reader may recall that, not very long ago, I was reading A Budget of Paradoxes by Augustus de Morgan, and that when de Morgan used the term paradox he did not use in in the sense of an apparent truth which seems to fly in the face of reason, but in the older sense of a tenet opposed to received opinion. De Morgan was especially concerned with cases of heterodoxy to which no credibility would be ascribed by the established mainstream.

Some paradoxes would later move from heterodoxy to orthodoxy, as when the Earth came to be viewed as closely approximated by a sphere, and with no particular claim to being the center of the universe. But most paradoxes are unreasonable, and have little chance of ever becoming orthodoxy.

I began reading de Morgan's Budget largely because I have at least a passing interest in cranky ideas. But reading it at the time that I did was not conducive to my mental health.

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Under ideal circumstances, one would not use a weight of opinion — whether the opinion were popular or that of experts — to approximate most sorts of truth. But circumstances are seldom ideal, and social norms are often less than optimal whatever the circumstances. When confronted with work that is heterodox about foundational matters, the vast majority of people judge work to be crackpot if it is not treated with respect by some ostensibly relevant population.

In cases where respect is used as the measure of authority, there can be a problem of whose respect is itself taken to have some authority; often a layering obtains. The topology of that layering can be conceptualized in at least three ways, but the point is that the layers run from those considered to have little authority beyond that to declare who has more authority, to those who are considered to actually do the most respected research, with respected popularizers usually in one of the layers in-between. In such structures, absurdities can obtain, such as presumptions that popularizers have themselves done important research, or that the more famous authorities are the better authorities.

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As I was reading de Morgan's book, my paper was waiting for a response from the seventh journal to which it had been offered. The first rejection had been preëmptory; no reason was given for it, though there was some assurance that this need not be taken as indicating that the paper were incompetent or unimportant. The next three rejections (2nd, 3rd, 4th) were less worrisome, as they seemed to be about the paper being too specialized, and two of them made a point of suggesting what the editor or reviewer thought to be more suitable journals. But then came the awful experience of my paper being held by Theory and Decision for more than a year-and-a half, with editor Mohammed Abdellaoui refusing to communicate with me about what the Hell were happening. And this was followed by a perverse rejection at the next journal from a reviewer with a conflict of interest. Six rejections[1] might not seem like a lot, but there really aren't that many academically respected journals which might have published my paper (especially as I vowed never again to submit anything to a Springer journal); I was running-out of possibilities.

I didn't produce my work with my reputation in mind, and I wouldn't see damage to my reputation as the worst consequence of my work being rejected; but de Morgan's book drew my attention to the grim fact that my work, which is heterodox and foundational, was in danger of being classified as crackpot, and I along with it.

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Crackpots, finding their work dismissed, often vent about the injustice of that rejection. That venting is taken by some as confirmation that the crackpots are crackpots. It's not; it's a natural reäction to a rejection that is perceived to be unjust, whether the perception is correct or not. The psychological effect can be profoundly injurious; crackpots may collapse or snap, but so may people who were perfectly reasonable in their heterodoxy. (Society will be inclined to see a collapse or break as confirmation that the person were a crackpot, until and unless the ostensible authorities reverse themselves, at which point the person may be seen as a martyr.)

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As things went from bad to worse for my paper, I dealt with how I felt by compartmentalization and dissociation. When the paper was first given conditional acceptance, my reäction was not one of happiness nor of relief; rather, with some greater prospect that the paper would be published, the structure of compartmentalization came largely undone, and I felt traumatized.

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Meanwhile, some other things in my life were going or just-plain went wrong, at least one of which I'll note in some later entry. In any case, the recent quietude of this 'blog hasn't been because I'd lost interest in it, but because properly to continue the 'blog this entry was needed, and I've not been in a good frame-of-mind to write it.

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[1] Actually five rejections joined with the behavior of Abdellaoui, which was something far worse than a rejection.

Those who attempted to visit this 'blog yester-day met with this proclamation that it were suspended by its author in protest against SOPA and against PIPA. None-the-less, when the Woman of Interest asked me whether I thought that the black-out protests would be effective, my answer in the late morning was negative.

First, I was inclined in advance to believe that deciding positions had already been taken (albeït not announced) some days ago by a majority in Congress and by the President, and that final outcomes would not be actually swung by the sort of protest that could plausibly be expected.

Additionally, by late morning, I felt that a rather poor protest had been mounted. Wikipedia, most famous of the protestors, ostensibly blacked-out its pages, but had left them so that hitting Esc as they loaded caused the ordinary content to be delivered. Google merely changed its home-page graphic, partially (but, tellingly, not fully) covering-over their name with a cocked black rectangle; never mind that those who invoke searches with a browser text-field don't see that graphic anyway! Many sites did no more than change their color-schemes.

I think that least effective were those who expressed their ostensible support for the black-out by posting those expressions, through-out the day, on the WWWeb, while withdrawing nothing. Now, let me make it plain that I have no quarrel with those who simply didn't participate in the black-out, or those who shut-down only some of their sites; the former may be perfectly consistent, the latter perhaps efficient. But those who weren't blacked-out in the least and discoursed upon their support for the black-out on the WWWeb as that black-out were in-progress seem not to understand that they were providing content in attempted support of an effort to provide a sense of the loss of content that would follow upon the passage of something such as SOPA or as PIPA. And if the only content that one normally provide were tweets and such, then exactly that were what one needed to halt to actually support a black-out.

Those in that last group ought to understand that SOPA or PIPA wouldn't simply mean that the WWWeb no longer offered them so much information and passive amusement; such an act would limit their ability to express themselves as freely as they do now. Along with Google and YouTube and Tumblr would go Facebook and Twitter and Blogger and all the other centralized social-networking sites. (Which is not to say that more autonomous sites, such as mine, would be spared.) People who won't g_dd_mn'd shut-up would be quite hard hit — which might be an amusing thought, but freedom of expression is essential, and not to be reduced to quiet chatter-boxes and pontificators.

My participation in the protest, however, wasn't conditioned on a presupposition that it would sway the body politic. My actions were essentially symbolic, and it wasn't necessary for me to believe that I would sway anyone, though I would hope at least that there'd be one or two sympathetic readers.

And my negativity about the black-out doesn't mean that I expected or expect one of these bills to pass, nor for it to avoid a Presidential veto, nor for the Supreme Court to rule in its favor. I don't know about the first two. (The President will certainly require cover if he is not to veto a bill of this sort, but perhaps he will think that he can get that cover from a signing statement.) I would be unpleasantly surprised by the last; the Supreme Court seems more genuinely alert to concerns about freedom of expression in recent years.

Of course, I may be wrong about the effect of the black-out, however feeble it may look to me. Representatives and Senators have been spooked by scarecrows in the past. But, if the bills failed, that failure wouldn't itself demonstrate that the black-out had a deciding effect.

I would definitely caution at this point that what appears to be strategic retreat may be merely tactical. The interests behind these bills are not going to go away, and features of these bills may be withdrawn at one stage only to be reïntroduced at another (such as reconciliation).

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The principal recommendation of many of those participating (however convincingly or pathetically) in the protest was that people should contact their Senators and Representatives. Well, the Senators from California are a knavish fool and a foolish knave, and the Representative for my district is at best a twit. I've tried moving those three in the past, and been met by silence or with inane boiler-plate. If they voted against these bills, it wouldn't be because of anything that I said to them. There's not even a sympathetic reader to be found amongst them. But I do know that other districts are not so grim.