Laziness and Labor: Variations on a Malevich Theme

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 259-272

What idleness, leisure, and free time have in common is that they are the opposite of labor; all three are linked with the cessation or interruption of labor. The article takes Kazimir Malevich’s provocative essay Laziness as the Truth of Mankind (1921) as the starting point for an examination of the complex and fraught issue of the balance between idleness and labor. Malevich redefines idleness as grace, as the point of labor and its peer, and as something that is not only a release from hard labor but that also leads to peace and God. The author proposes a reading of Malevich’s apologetics of idleness in juxtaposition with Marx’s early focus on the issues of human freedom and on alleviating alienation in a newly arranged society, and with Paul Lafargue’s argument that workers would do better to fight for the right to be idle than for the right to work. The comparison with Marx and Lafargue reveals a fundamental flaw in their socialist program of heroic labor, which preserved the exploitation of labor but had the state rather than the capitalists appropriate it. Malevich’s argument comes close to certain insights of John Maynard Keynes in which he envisaged science and technology resolving economic problems by enabling humanity to enter an age of idleness and plenty. Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical deliberations round out the contemporary understanding of the relationship between labor and idleness. From this point of view, laziness and idleness become essential elements of meaningful labor. The option to remain idle, to reject work, to prolong it or to delay its completion are becoming the sine qua non of creative labor worthy of a free person.

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 1993-2005
Author(s):  
Shemsije Demiri ◽  
Rudina Kaja

This paper deals with the right to property in general terms from its source in Roman law, which is the starting point for all subsequent legal systems. As a result of this, the acquisition of property rights is handled from the historical point of view, with the inclusion of various local and international literature and studies, as well as the legal aspect devoted to the respective civil codes of the states cited in the paper.Due to such socio-economic developments, state ownership and its ownership function have changed. The state function as owner of property also changed in Macedonia's property law.The new constitutional sequence of the Republic of Macedonia since 1991 became privately owned as a dominant form of ownership, however, state ownership also exists.This process of transforming social property into state or private (dissolves), in Macedonia starts from Yugoslavia through privatization, return and denationalization measures, on which basis laws on privatization have been adopted. Because of this, there will be particularly intensive negotiations regaring the remaining state assets.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Escotet Espinoza

UNSTRUCTURED Over half of Americans report looking up health-related questions on the internet, including questions regarding their own ailments. The internet, in its vastness of information, provides a platform for patients to understand how to seek help and understand their condition. In most cases, this search for knowledge serves as a starting point to gather evidence that leads to a doctor’s appointment. However, in some cases, the person looking for information ends up tangled in an information web that perpetuates anxiety and further searches, without leading to a doctor’s appointment. The Internet can provide helpful and useful information; however, it can also be a tool for self-misdiagnosis. Said person craves the instant gratification the Internet provides when ‘googling’ – something one does not receive when having to wait for a doctor’s appointment or test results. Nevertheless, the Internet gives that instant response we demand in those moments of desperation. Cyberchondria, a term that has entered the medical lexicon in the 21st century after the advent of the internet, refers to the unfounded escalation of people’s concerns about their symptomatology based on search results and literature online. ‘Cyberchondriacs’ experience mistrust of medical experts, compulsion, reassurance seeking, and excessiveness. Their excessive online research about health can also be associated with unnecessary medical expenses, which primarily arise from anxiety, increased psychological distress, and worry. This vicious cycle of searching information and trying to explain current ailments derives into a quest for associating symptoms to diseases and further experiencing the other symptoms of said disease. This psychiatric disorder, known as somatization, was first introduced to the DSM-III in the 1980s. Somatization is a psycho-biological disorder where physical symptoms occur without any palpable organic cause. It is a disorder that has been renamed, discounted, and misdiagnosed from the beginning of the DSMs. Somatization triggers span many mental, emotional, and cultural aspects of human life. Our environment and social experiences can lay the blueprint for disorders to develop over time; an idea that is widely accepted for underlying psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety. The research is going in the right direction by exploring brain regions but needs to be expanded on from a sociocultural perspective. In this work, we explore the relationship between somatization disorder and the condition known as cyberchondria. First, we provide a background on each of the disorders, including their history and psychological perspective. Second, we proceed to explain the relationship between the two disorders, followed by a discussion on how this relationship has been studied in the scientific literature. Thirdly, we explain the problem that the relationship between these two disorders creates in society. Lastly, we propose a set of intervention aids and helpful resource prototypes that aim at resolving the problem. The proposed solutions ranged from a site-specific clinic teaching about cyberchondria to a digital design-coded chrome extension available to the public.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 742
Author(s):  
Jian Peng ◽  
Xiaoming Mei ◽  
Wenbo Li ◽  
Liang Hong ◽  
Bingyu Sun ◽  
...  

Scene understanding of remote sensing images is of great significance in various applications. Its fundamental problem is how to construct representative features. Various convolutional neural network architectures have been proposed for automatically learning features from images. However, is the current way of configuring the same architecture to learn all the data while ignoring the differences between images the right one? It seems to be contrary to our intuition: it is clear that some images are easier to recognize, and some are harder to recognize. This problem is the gap between the characteristics of the images and the learning features corresponding to specific network structures. Unfortunately, the literature so far lacks an analysis of the two. In this paper, we explore this problem from three aspects: we first build a visual-based evaluation pipeline of scene complexity to characterize the intrinsic differences between images; then, we analyze the relationship between semantic concepts and feature representations, i.e., the scalability and hierarchy of features which the essential elements in CNNs of different architectures, for remote sensing scenes of different complexity; thirdly, we introduce CAM, a visualization method that explains feature learning within neural networks, to analyze the relationship between scenes with different complexity and semantic feature representations. The experimental results show that a complex scene would need deeper and multi-scale features, whereas a simpler scene would need lower and single-scale features. Besides, the complex scene concept is more dependent on the joint semantic representation of multiple objects. Furthermore, we propose the framework of scene complexity prediction for an image and utilize it to design a depth and scale-adaptive model. It achieves higher performance but with fewer parameters than the original model, demonstrating the potential significance of scene complexity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 116-121
Author(s):  
Kseniia Ivanova

Problem setting. One of the subsystems of the National Innovative System is the field of technology transfer. Considering the NIS from the point of view of the interests pursued by its participants (subjects), the mechanism introduced by the legislator, providing legal regulation of certain social relations, directly depends on what interests they pursue. Analysis of recent researches and publications. The following scientists drew attention to the problems of regulation of relations in the field of technology transfer: O. M. Davydiuk, Yu. M. Kapitsa, D. S. Makhnovsky, V. S. Milash, O. P. Orlyuk, B. M. Paduchak, O. E. Simson. However, further study of these relations remains relevant especially in view of the constant updating of current legislation. Target of research is to analyze the mechanisms for satisfying the interests of participants (subjects) of technology transfer, which are introduced in the current legislation and are proposed for the future. Article’s main body. Considering the national innovative system from the point of view of the interests pursued by its participants (subjects), we can distinguish the interests of the author of the technology, recipient, technology donor and the state, whose interests determine the overall vector of the transfer process. The primary subject in technology transfer is the author of the technology – an individual who can act as a direct participant (subject) of technology transfer and be its donor, who independently decides the legal fate of the technology and / or its components. However, the author of the technology may not be a donor when it comes to the relationship between him and his employer as a performer of scientific research and development work for the budget. In this case, although the technology is created by the direct work of the author-employee, property rights to the technology are assigned to the enterprise, research institution, organization or institution of higher education as the executor of these works (organization-developer), and the author is entitled to royalties. Thus, a compromise is reached between the parties and provides the necessary balance of interests of the employer and the author. In the transfer of technology, which occurs through the conclusion of the contract, the interests of the parties to the contract are mutually conditioned. These entities, realizing their property interests, act in contractual relations on the principle of dispositiveness, ie equality of the parties, and the state does not interfere in these relations. And only when the sphere of interests of the subjects of transfer affects the interests of the state, the relationship is complicated by the establishment of additional requirements and / or procedures (in particular, the export of technologies created or purchased from the budget). The interest of the state in this case is due to the purpose of preserving national and technological security, control over the misuse of budget funds during the financing of R & D, solving other strategic tasks. The protective mechanism of legal support of the state’s interests introduced in the Law is implemented through the establishment of requirements for the use of technology and / or their components, created or purchased for budget funds, mainly on the territory of Ukraine; conducting state expertise for technologies and / or their components, which are purchased for budget funds (including through their import). Meanwhile, the world practice is aware of other means aimed at protecting the interests of the state, such as control over the re-export of technology in order to eliminate the possibility of further transfer of technology from its donor to others. Conclusions and prospects for the development. The field of technology transfer is characterized by a combination of imperative and dispositive methods of legal regulation. When concluding a technology transfer agreement, the parties agree on its terms, based on their own interests and the requirements for certain types of agreements. However, lawyers note: the wider the range of interests (individual, group), which are directly or indirectly affected by the contract, the more important should be the degree of legal regulation. Therefore, when it comes to the interests of the state, the legislator should not neglect the ability to imperatively determine the requirements to be met by the parties in technology transfer and which provide for the implementation of additional incentives for the introduction of domestic technologies into circulation, their practical application in production.


Sæculum ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-83
Author(s):  
Ionel Nariţa

AbstractBy „dispute” we mean an argumentative dialog where each of the two parts state opposite theses. Two sentences can be contrary if they have similar reference, but incompatible predicates (SIP – sentences with incompatible predicates). Usually, the disputes are solved using force in different ways, but that does not mean that the winner is right and his thesis is true. Therefore, we cannot evaluate a thesis on the ground of its success, but we need a reference mark for that. According to the Sophist school, the individual is the only reference mark, so any SIP is equally justified. The absolutist point of view claims that there is an objective reference mark and, consequently, the truth is, at its turn, objective and unique. Finally, the relativist orientation rejects any objective reference mark, but the right thesis is not arbitrary, as the sophists thought, it is true relatively to the state of the evaluator to a given moment. It follows that, for any evaluator, at a moment of time, only one SIP is true.


2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Teresa Sierra

La policía comunitaria es una institución de los pueblos indígenas de Guerrero conocida por su capacidad para enfrentar a la delincuencia y generar alternativas de paz social., através de un sistema de justicia y seguridad autónomo. En los últimos años, sin embargo, el sistema comunitario enfrenta el acoso de actores diversos vinculados al incremento de la violencia y la inseguridad que se vive en el país y especialmente en el estado de Guerrero; dicha situación está impactando a la institucionalidad comunitaria, obligando a su redefinición. En este trabajo destaco aspectos centrales de dicha conflictividad así como las respuestas que han dado los comunitarios para hacer frente a las tareas de justicia y seguridad en el marco de nuevos contextos marcados por el despojo neoliberal y la impunidad de actores estatales y no estatales. En este proceso se actualiza la relación de la policía comunitaria con el Estado revelando el peso de la ambigüedad legal y los juegos del poder así como los usos contra-hegemónicos del derecho para disputar la justicia. ---SEGURANÇA E JUSTIÇA SOB ACOSSO EM TEMPOS DE VIOLÊNCIA NEOLIBERAL: respostas do policiamento comunitário de GuerreroO policiamento comunitário é uma instituição dos Povos Indígenas do Guerrero conhecidos por sua capacidade de lidar com o crime e gerar paz social de forma alternativa, usando um sistema próprio de justiça e segurança. Nos últimos anos, no entanto, o sistema da UE enfrenta assédio de várias autoridades envolvidas no aumento da violência e da insegurança que reina no país e, especialmente, no estado de Guerrero; essa situação está afetando as instituições comunitárias, forçando a sua redefinição. Neste artigo, destaco os principais aspectos do conflito e as respostas que têm a comunidade para lidar com as tarefas da justiça e da segurança no contexto dos novos contextos marcados por pilhagem neoliberal e a impunidade de atores estatais e não estatais. Neste processo, a relação de policiamento comunitário com o estado é atualizada, revelando o peso da ambiguidade e dos jogos de poder legais, além de usos contra-hegemônicos do direito de disputar a justiça.Palavras-chave: violência neoliberal; Guerrero; comunidades indígenas---SECURITY AND JUSTICE UNDER HARASSMENT IN TIMES OF NEOLIBERAL VIOLENCE: responses of the Community Police of GuerreroThe community police is an institution of the Indigenous Peoples of Guerrero known for its ability to deal with crime and generate alternatives for social peace, using a system of justice and self security. In recent years, however, the EU system faces harassment from various people responsible for the increase of violence and insecurity within the country and especially in the state in Guerrero; this situation is impacting instituitions in the community, forcing their redefinition. In this paper I highlight key aspects of the conflict and the community's responses to deal with the tasks of justice and security in new contexts marked by neoliberal plunder and impunity of the state (as well as non state figures). In this process, the relationship of the community police with the state is updated revealing the weight of legal ambiguity and power plays, as well as counter-hegemonic use of the right to dispute justice.key words: neoliberal vilence; Guerrero; indigenous people.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahul Mukherji ◽  
Seyed Hossein Zarhani ◽  
K. Raju

This article argues that the Indian state can develop the capacity to deliver economic rights in a citizen-friendly way, despite serious challenges posed by patronage politics and clientelism. Clientelistic politics reveals why the Indian state fails to deliver the basic rights such as the right to work, health and education. We argue that the ability of the state to deliver owes a lot to bureaucratic puzzling and political powering over developmental ideas in a path-dependent way. We combine powering and puzzling within the state to argue the case for how these ideas tip after they have gained a fair amount of traction within the state. We test the powering and puzzling leading to a tipping point model on the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in undivided Andhra Pradesh (AP). How and why did undivided AP develop the capacity to make reach employment to the rural poor, when many other states failed to implement the right to work in India?


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-56
Author(s):  
Maria Elena Vera Villagran ◽  
L. Myriam Sagarnaga Villegas ◽  
Jose Salas Gonzalez ◽  
Juan Leos Rodriguez

This project looks for the relationship among variables influencing Mexican key lime supply and demand in the domestic and US market under the scenario of using a higher quantity of fertilizers as a strategy for responding against the threat of citrus greening (HLB). With the help of domestic and international databases from 2000 to 2012, a simultaneous equations model was built capturing behavioral and technical variables influencing supply and demand. The most important relationships among variables were price of the product and disposable income for the demand and use of fertilizers and exchange rate for the supply. This work gives the insight, from the economic point of view, that building a model including the right key variables will give a sense of the general structure of a market and the changes in stability due to a sanitary threat


Author(s):  
Dillon Mahoney

This chapter traces the development of Kenya’s tourism and handicraft industries from their roots in 20th century British colonialism to provide some of the broader history of Kenya’s tourism and co-operative development, their emergence in Mombasa, and their relationships with local governments. I draw on archival as well as ethnographic data collected just before the 2002 demolition of Mombasa’s roadside kiosks, which form the starting point for the larger longitudinal study. I focus on the array of experiences of Mombasa’s roadside traders of diverse backgrounds as they struggle with the privatization and segregation of urban residential and commercial space both before and after the demolitions. The economy was radically altered as the roadsides were “cleaned” and a new wave of economic formalization characterized the relationship between small-scale businesspeople and the state. For many entrepreneurs invested in the global crafts trade, this was the final straw that pushed them toward new technologies, jumping scales into global markets, and investing in export and wholesale businesses that were not spatially dependent upon a connection to the city center.


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