This is the quiet truth of institutional work: improvement doesn’t buy freedom. It buys responsibility without ownership. This guest essay by longtime correspondent 0bserver describes the core dynamics of work in America and the global economy: if we don’t own our work, we only “rent” our income and the life it […]
Those acting with impunity are confident that their powers or god-like because they appear so in the human realm. But there are limits to everything in the human realm. One of the first things we learned about the Internet is that anything sent via email could readily become public and anything […]
We no longer care who’s behind the curtain because we’re in charge of our own lives now. The Good News is people are realizing We’re On Our Own and starting to take action accordingly. This article describes how people in one low-income county are localizing self-reliance rather than remain dependent on government […]
How much private credit has been put in place but isn’t in the official credit total is unknown and very likely unknowable. That means total systemic risk is also unknowable. Everyone wants to lend us money now, even though they’re not banks: the insurance company Progressive offered us a loan, PayPal […]
This is why “knowledge is power”: those who define what is “knowable” and “known” shape the reality of everyone in the model / system. Oh crikey, is this another boring post trying to make philosophy relevant? No, it’s a post about survival of the fittest, as what we “know” will lead […]
No wonder the world seems deranged–it is deranged by the immense strength of an Old Guard clinging onto power by any means available even as the world around them spins into incoherence. There are many reasons why we fail, but perhaps the most critical one is continuing to do more of what has […]
The conclusion that soaring asset prices mean the economy is strong is a hallucination that goes unrecognized because the entire financial system is hallucinating. Consider the data that the financial sector bases conclusions / decisions on (i.e. the data that the financial sector “trains” on) in a Bubble Economy like the present. The […]
Yes, AI is a catalyst. But for what is not yet knowable. The current narrative holds that the big problem we need to solve is conjuring up cheap energy to power AI data centers. Fortunately for us, the solutions are at hand: building modular nuclear power plants at scale and tapping […]
What we’ve lost are the foundations of a healthy standard of living / quality of life. Amidst the constant drumbeat of tech “progress” and grandiose “solutions,” it’s a useful exercise to ask: what have we lost in the past 40 years despite all the “progress” and “solutions”? Put another way: what […]
Here’s the real problem: there’s no profit in a raw carrot and a walk around the block. Here’s our mythology in a nutshell: human needs are limited but human desires are unlimited, and the economy is fueled by smart people motivated by profit to fulfill our desires. Since desires and human […]