Happy Agricultural Reform Day! link roundup
September 30th, 2011 | Published in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
No, really: on this day São Tomé and Príncipe celebrates the nationalization of large plantations. There should really be more holidays like that.
31 years ago today the Ethernet specification was published, and without it this blog wouldn’t be possible.
8 years ago today, Yusuf Bey died. I’m mentioning that mostly as an excuse to link to the insane saga of Your Black Muslim Bakery.
I’ve now risen high enough in Google’s algorithms to get some interesting search engine traffic. My favorites from the past week or so:
- “how to short germany”. Sorry, we’re not a financial advice blog here, can’t help you.
- “i’m reading huckleberry finn for english but i’m not getting what’s going on at all”. My one post on Huck Finn probably didn’t help this guy either.
- “коммодификация”. Google Translate tells me this is Russian for “commodification”.
- “how does someone steal shoes from department stores”. I believe stuffing them under your coat is a popular method.
- “do we still have capitalism”. Good question! I think I actually do have some helpful things to say about this.
- “the book of job translation in modern english”. I think this person was actually looking for information about “the job of book translation”, which I do have one post about. But “the book of job translation” isn’t a bad description of a lot of the other writing here.
- “business cycle turkey”. Mmmm, turkey.
Anyway, your links:
What’s that expression, it’s not the crime, it’s the pepper spraying? The media was all set to ignore the Wall Street protests, until the cops decided to go buck wild. Click that link to see former Daniel Patrick Moynihan advisor Lawrence O’Donnell sounding like vintage Ice Cube: “There’s a Rodney King every day in this country, and black America has always known that.”
Speaking of Ice Cube, “My Summer Vacation” is a great track about some LA gangbangers moving to Saint Louis to start up a new franchise. Listen to that as you read about how today’s gangs spread to America’s smaller cities.
And speaking of Occupy Wall Street, check out my pal Chris Maisano and my organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, in this Salon article.
More OWS: I haven’t written anything about Occupy Wall Street because I’m not sure what to say about it, even though I’m rooting for it to succeed and expand. Perhaps because it’s not sure what to say about itself. Still, it’s looking like things are starting to gather some momentum.
Just to be clear, the Obama administration is now in the business of assassinating American citizens whenever they feel like it, with no due process or legal oversight. In a different context, we’d use words like “death squad” to refer to stuff like this.
Groupon seems like it’s either an egregious scam or the next big tech company or possibly both, or perhaps just pure bezzle. Felix salmon explains why the company may not be doomed, and why the huge amount of money taken out of the money-losing company by its founders could be a rational venture capitalist strategy rather than the crass looting I always figured it was. I still think they’re doomed, though.
I already mentioned it, but here again: this series of articles about the replacement of human labor with robots is quite good on the specifics of automation, but it goes with what’s basically a “jobless future” argument, and is therefore probably wrong: capitalism is endlessly capable of coming up with things that humans can be paid to do. It’s always a mistake to say “in the future there will be no jobs” rather than “in the future we could spent a lot less time in paid labor”. The real lesson here is that there’s no reason to keep coming up with alienating jobs for people, and we have the opportunity to live lives that are mostly free of the drudgery of unwanted work, but only if a political movement arises to make that happen. As always, see “Anti-Star Trek”, along with “Against Jobs” and its follow-up, for my more considered reflections on this topic.
Oceania has always been at war against inflation.
Tom Slee asked very nicely that everyone go read this old post. Tom Slee is great, so you should do what he says.
“That’s probably the pragmatic way to look at it. But it seems to me, though, that it’s a concession to a step back in civilization”. You’ll just have to watch the whole thing to find out what the context of that statement is. Salim Muwakkil is kind of a national treasure, but you probably don’t know about him unless you’ve lived in Chicago. Should you happen to catch the fever, though, go on to watch this clip, especially after about the six minute mark. “Did that kind of radicalize you, when you were shot?”
If you like quantitative data, survey research, and corrections for measurement error, you’ll love this video about how the Census Bureau fixed an error in their new count of same-gender couples. Which is to say, I loved it. And if that doesn’t have enough complicated mathematical equations for you, there’s a technical paper!
New home sales in 2011 are on pace to be the lowest since at least 1963. Sales this year are at less than a quarter of what they were in 2005, at the peak of the bubble.
Epic Bureau of Economic Analysis fail. I knew that their initial estimates of the severity of the recession were off, but I hadn’t caught that they revised the GDP growth number from Q4 2008 from -3.8% all the way down to -8.9%!!! Let this be a lesson to all us quants who rely on U.S. government statistics.
Some random day trader got on TV and caused a big uproar by confirming every suspicion you ever had that finance guys are amoral, callous assholes who don’t actually care about the health of the global economy. Then people started to wonder whether the whole thing might be a Yes Men hoax.
Via the Jacobin crew, I found out that it’s Capitalism Awareness Week. I hope that this consciousness-raising effort serves to increase awareness of the capitalism epidemic and the risk it poses to the public.
I still don’t know what the current Palestinian statehood initiative is actually going to amount to, but at least it’s leading to things like this. Tony Blair is truly one of the most contemptible living humans.
Anyone who took that Onion story about congressional hostage-taking seriously, or thinks the Onion “went too far”, is, to quote Charles Barkley, a stone freaking idiot.
Corporations have figured out that they can manipulate Tea Partiers into doing their lobbying for them.