Writer

Charles Hugh Smith on Japan example of Narcissism, Consumerism, and the End Of Growth. What we're seeing in Japan is the confluence of three dynamics: definancialization, the demise of growth-positive demographics and the devolution of the consumerist model of endless "demand" and "Economic Growth ." Japan is the leading-edge of the crumbling model of advanced neoliberal capitalism: that consumerist excess creates wealth, prosperity and happiness.

law created by the US Congress and signed by George W Bush in Aug'2005 containing billions of dollars in Pork Barrel projects, buried among the actual HighWay construction/maintenance. (more)

Doc Searls notes RIAA toady Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), accompanpied by co-toadies Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joe Biden (D-DE) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), have re-introduced the Net- user- podcaster- radio- satellite- freedom- technology- and market-hostile PERFORM act, which failed to gain traction after it was introduced last year.

Dan Miller of Opus Research: If Bots Take Over for Humans We Only Have Ourselves to Blame - Small Business Trends (more)

Associated with the ColdWar. (more)

Doug Muder: What’s Our Story? If Western society no longer feels comfortable telling the Greece-to-Rome-to-Europe story (Narrative) (in which progress’ forward march leads to democracy, science, and human rights), what story should we be telling? (more)

CoFounder of ReddIt and others. (more)

Adam Rogers on SciFi for kids (Young Adult). Since the first Harry Potter hit the stands in 1997, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, and other luminaries have written books aimed directly at kids … and found that adults kinda like ’em, too. With review of China Mieville's UnLundDun.

Science Fiction. You're really supposed to call it "sf" now, but that's just too silly for me. (more)

A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel: most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease in Mental Health in a later year. (more)

Scott Rosenberg on How Google Book Search Got Lost. “You have thousands of years of human knowledge, and probably the highest-quality knowledge is captured in books,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin told The New Yorker at the time. “So not having that — it’s just too big an omission.” (more)

James Somers on Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: Google Book Search. You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. It was to be the realization of a long-held dream. “The universal library has been talked about for millennia,” Richard Ovenden, the head of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, has said. (more)

Matt Taibbi on the New Book That Brutalizes the Hillary Clinton Campaign. If you're wondering what might be the point of rehashing this now, the responsibility for opposing Donald Trump going forward still rests with the (mostly anonymous) voices described in this book (more)

Nassim Taleb On Interventionistas and their Mental Defects (more)

Shel Holtz: Mastodon: Here to stay or DOA? (more)

Bell Curve of adopters/buyers of new technology, based on where in the technology's Life Cycle they hop on board, etc. (more)

Ben Thompson on Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly (more)

human approach to DRM challenge: instead of using tech to lock up the binary file, generate unique-to-buyer info in file "for exclusive use of (John Doe)" (this is mainly applicable to EBooks) (more)

Matthew Skala: Mastodon WTF timeline (more)