Megacorps do not care about you: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/01/Megacorps-are-not-your-dream-job.html (Gemini: gemini://drewdevault.com/2021/01/01/Megacorps-are-not-your-dream-job.gmi) Only be as loyal to your employer as your employer is to you.

#latestagecapitalism #tech #frightfulfive #faang #labor #scams

The KLF are back after almost 30 years. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-55507226 #klf

I wish everyone a happy and healthy 2021. At the risk of being a bummer, please continue to be safe regarding COVID; it may be with us in intermittent outbreaks for the next decade: https://news.yahoo.com/covid-coronavirus-outbreaks-with-us-10-years-142138691.html

#covid #2021 #publichealth

Each of us has something to give.
All of us must do our part.
Today, tomorrow, and every day forward.

Some of us will falter or fail.
How will we overcome the division in this land?
I pledge to do my part to combat the strife in America.
This is all I ask of you.

A message for my Republican friends in my last toot:

Going forward, there will be difficulty reuniting and healing.
Every four years, we face uncertainty.
The American system will prevail as we move past the divisions of the electoral cycle.

Future generations will judge how we have been stewards of the promise of democracy.
Unity does not demand uniformity but will for us all pull toward the common good.
Can we do this?
Kindly, patiently, deliberately, patriotically: can we do this?
Everyone one of us needs to do our part.
Do yours today.

@BlueStateBabe That makes two of us. Like when Robert Willner injected himself with HIV on television. (Clearly, the subject of this article is lite years away from that unscientific nonsense, just saying that I was reminded of it.)

@stark Vaccines should 100% be open, obviously for the humane reasons that they save lives and because they are almost always publicly funded anyway. That is a little different than injecting stuff in your veins and seeing what happens. I am not an alarmist when it comes to biohacking but I see a lot of pitfalls and I have yet to see many meaningful successes. Feel free to dispel my ignorance.

A compelling argument for why cryptocurrencies are irrelevant: http://jwmason.org/slackwire/on-cryptocurrencies/

I usually post a link and a take but in this case, I cannot boil it down to 500 characters (in part because I am too ignorant). I recommend reading this if you appreciate David Graeber and Modern Monetary Theory (even tho it is not called out by name).

#economics #finance #capitalism #latestagecapitalism #financecapitalism #cryptocurrencies

Biohackers discover that making vaccines is hard: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-10/home-made-covid-vaccine-appeared-to-work-but-questions-remained

In theory, I am in favor of democratizing science and I like the idea of someone having a do-it-yourself attitude but when it comes to vaccines, this may be a domain of knowledge where we should trust expertise.

#biohacking

Being “apolitical” is being conservative because you are tacitly saying that existing power structures are just fine: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/09/coinbase-silicon-valley-libertarian/

As always, management in business is conservative and the so-called “liberalism” or “left-wing” nature of tech companies and San Francisco is BS: that is all one big experiment in capitalism and is extremely conservative (e.g. look at tech attempts at union-busting).

#tech #capitalism #conservatism

The underperformance of value stocks (and subsequent overperformance of tech stocks) has me deeply worried: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/19/the-age-old-strategy-of-buying-cheap-shares-is-faltering

The market needs companies that actually make useful products. I am inclined to blame this bloated valuation of tech stocks on aggressive stock buybacks that artificially manipulate stock prices and will result in another boom/bust, which is just baked into how capitalism is structured now, no matter how many Millennials it hurts.

#latestagecapitalism #tech #scams

The third one is included in my last link but called out here for just how screwed my generation is. Millennials own less than 5% of all U.S. wealth: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/09/millennials-own-less-than-5percent-of-all-us-wealth.html

Boomers have self-dealt and ridden a wave of economic prosperity handed to them on a golden platter but have not seen fit to make a system that works for Generation X and certainly not for Milllennials. Neoliberalism, finance capitalism, and surveillance capitalism are scourges.

#economics #millennials #boomers #capitalism

Second of three: The 50 Richest Americans Are Worth as Much as the Poorest 165 Million https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-richest-people-in-the-us-are-worth-as-much-as-poorest-165-million

A “fun” thought experiment you can do with a capitalist is to keep on asking if it would be okay if only eight billionaires had as much money as 300 million Americans or just two had as much wealth as 4 billion persons, etc. Is it fine if the market just concentrates 99% of wealth in the hands of 0.01% of the population?

#economics #capitalism #latestagecapitalism #wealthconcentration

The first of three brief economic snapshots: An effective way of fighting poverty is to just give cash to the poor https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/09/americas/direct-giving-homeless-people-vancouver-trnd/index.html

This was also done effectively under Lula in Brazil. I find it very hard to square the conservative dicta about how economic actors are rational and will just take care of themselves if the government stays out of their business while also being opposed to demonstrably cheaper and efficient policies like this one.

#economics #poverty

@Karasu Carrying capacity? The Earth can definitely sustain 10 billion humans: this is just a question of the allocation of resources. The good news is that it looks like the human population will plateau around there or before. The bad news is that there is no political will to keep many billions of those lives form being miserable.

@process @XanHart Could not agree more.

@XanHart No, as I wrote, I disagree with this author about CSS pretty fundamentally.

I disagree with this author about CSS pretty fundamentally and he makes some odd points that I am not sure I agree with at all but it is valuable to consider using Links (or Lynx) as a go-to browser: https://dataswamp.org/~lich/musings/links-browser.html Even viewing the Web with JavaScript turned off is revelatory. The world needs a strong backbone of a text-based, small, weird, personal Web and not just JavaScript walled gardens.

#web #text

The original federated system is email and newsletters are seeing a Renaissance: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/24/substack-email-newsletter-journalism/

This may be a viable path for journalism (I hope!) but I am concerned about the prospects of gatekeepers (Gmail, Mailchimp, Substack) deciding what is and is not spam. If you do an email newsletter, also do RSS.

#email #federation #journalism #web4.0