Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:
"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (#SteinsLaw)
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)
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The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:
But "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop" (#SteinsLaw). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between #feudalism and...feudalism.
Back when I was writing on @boingbot, I'd slam out 10-15 blog posts every day, short hits that served as signpost and public notebook, but I rarely got into longer analysis of the sort I do daily now on Pluralistic. Both modes are very useful for organizing one's thoughts, and indeed, they complement each other:
If that's piqued your interest and if you can make it to #LosAngeles, come by #ChevaliersBooks this Wednesday, where Brian and I are having a joint book-launch (I've just published #TheInternetCon, my Luddite-adjacent "#BigTech Disassembly Manual"):
The saga of the #Sacklers, a multigenerational billionaire crime family of mass-murdering dope-peddlers, is an enraging parable about how the wealthy, the courts, and sadistic high-powered lawyers collude to destroy the lives of millions, profit handsomely, and evade justice.
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But #SteinsLaw says that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As lawsuits mounted, the Sacklers found themselves increasingly synonymous with death, not charitable works. But like any canny criminal, the Sacklers had a getaway plan.
First, they extracted vast sums from Purdue and shifted it into offshore financial secrecy havens:
When it comes to the modern world of #enshittified, terrible businesses, no addition to your vocabulary is more essential than "#bezzle," #JKGalbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"
First, #SteinsLaw: "Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop."
Second, #Keynes's: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
On the one hand, extremely badly run businesses that strip all the value out of the firm, making things progressively worse for its suppliers, workers and customers will eventually fail (Stein's Law).
This week on my podcast, I read my recent @medium column, "Ideas Lying Around: Milton Friedman was a monster, but he wasn’t wrong about this," which I describe a #TheoryOfChange for unrigging markets, addressing the climate emergency, building worker power and fixing the imbalance between news publishers and #BigTech:
His ideas are firmly rooted in the center, and the ideas that delivered environmental regulation, decent jobs, and progress on gender and racial equality have been banished to the periphery.
But there will be crises. As #SteinsLaw goes, "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." In every domain of human endeavor, we lurch from crisis to crisis: labor, climate, discrimination, corruption.