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A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:
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These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society - and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.
The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to people who were only dimly aware of finance, especially how complexity was a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.
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Here's an underrated cognitive virtue: "object permanence" - that is, remembering how you perceived something previously. As Riley Quinn often reminds us, the left is the ideology of object permanence - to be a leftist is to hate and mistrust the CIA even when they're tormenting Trump for a brief instant, or to remember that it was once possible for a working person to support their family with their wages:
I was at the Wayback Machine's launch party, and right away, I could see its value. Today, I make extensive use of Wayback Machine captures for my "This Day In History" posts, and when I find dead links on the web.
The Wayback Machine went public in 2001, but Archive founder @brewsterkahle started scraping the web in 1996. Today's post graphic - a modified Yahoo homepage from October 17, 1996 - is the oldest Yahoo capture on the Wayback Machine:
And so is the Internet Archive, which makes the legal threats it faces today all the more frightening. Lawsuits brought by the Big Five publishers and Big Three labels will, if successful, snuff out the Internet Archive altogether, and with it, the Wayback Machine - the only record we have of our ephemeral internet:
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Depending on how you look at it, I either grew up in the periphery of the labor movement, or atop it, or surrounded by it. For a kid, labor issues don't really hold a lot of urgency - in places with mature labor movements, kids don't really have jobs, and the part-time jobs I had as a kid (paper route, cleaning a dance studio) were pretty benign.
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You don't have to accept the arguments of capitalism's defenders to take those arguments seriously. When Adam Smith railed against rentiers and elevated profit to a means of converting the intrinsic selfishness of the wealthy into an engine of production, he had a point:
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I think that most of the right's defense of monopolies stems from cynical, bad-faith rationalizations - but there are people who've absorbed these rationalizations and find them superficially plausible. It's worth developing these critiques, for their sake.
@pluralistic In regards to "The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit" I can only say WTF? Boston Dynamics had created human like (and dog like) robots, and they work.
As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes - like space colonization - have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.
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