Monthly Archives: August 2018

This is my economic recovery programme. It’s mine! And when I say it’s mine, I mean: it’s the people’s.

Venezuela’s Pres. Nicolas Maduro, channeling Daffy Duck in  a tweet last week

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Two Oaks, One Rich, One Poor.

Water inequality in Griffith Park.  

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The sheer number of displaced persons and the appalling public health calamity they, and thus we, now face in our public spaces (yegads, Metro!) is a deep and physically repulsive wound in our city. LA is a modern city undergoing medieval conditions of sanitation in the public zone (parks, canyons, freeway off-ramps, business zones, sidewalks, the riverbed, etc.) With no city leadership at all on the maintenance of public facilities to help people relieve themselves and get clean and shaved and safely sheltered, businesses feel justified in a Dickensian bigotry against the poor, in their suddenly exploding numbers. 

We can’t expect civilization if we treat each other like wild animals.  

Where the sidewalk ends: LA businesses put up fences to keep out homeless

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People are finally realizing that the Internet – instant communication, infinite memory, global range, and almost mo marginal cost – makes the apparatus of the “scarcity economy” go away forever. 

Business types have embraced tech and the Internet because they sense that computers can crush labor costs down to negligibility. At last, the cherished goal capitalists have sought for centuries, is possible: to devise a corporation that has no human workers at all – only owners, raking in every cent of revenue, automatically. 

If they were not so blinded by greed, they might realize that if the Internet kills labor, it also kills management. If it makes working for a living redundant, it also makes banks obsolete. If it lets firms crunch massive amounts of information about customers, it also empowers customers to find ways to circumvent the the artificial rent-seeking choke-points – the drag-chains – which the robber barons have strung along all the rivers of commerce.

Banks Are Becoming Obsolete in China—Could the U.S. Be Next?