Ben Hunt: The Death of Risk. I think most of us are like Robert Frost. I know I am. When I think about how bad things might happen, how our world might end, I tend to imagine it in a series of mighty events like market crashes that explode like bombs and result in a blaze of destruction. That’s the romantic in me and Frost, imagining that we perish in fiery excitement. I suspect, though, that the far more common end is that we die in the bathtub. (more)

The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states in the mid 20th century. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent nation-states. Jul'1944. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system (more)

A reserve currency is a foreign currency that is held by governments, central banks or other monetary authorities as part of their foreign exchange reserves.[1] The reserve currency can be used in international transactions, international investments and all aspects of the global economy. It is often considered a hard currency or safe-haven currency. The United Kingdom's pound sterling was the primary reserve currency of much of the world in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.[2] However, by the middle of the 20th century, the United States dollar had become the world's dominant reserve currency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency (more)

aka Federal Debt/National Debt for any sovereign Nation-State (more)

Andreessen Horowitz Venture Capital firm. (more)

ThinkProgress was an American progressive news website that was active from 2005 to 2019. It was a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action), a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization. Founded by Judd Legum in 2005, the site's reports were regularly discussed by mainstream news outlets and peer-reviewed academic journals. ThinkProgress also hosted a climate section called Climate Progress, which was founded by Joe Romm. In 2019, after financial losses, CAP Action unsuccessfully sought a new publisher for the site.[1] No new content has been added since September 2019, rendering ThinkProgress effectively defunct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkProgress

creator of decent journalism

Cory Doctorow: A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation. As unbearably cringe as the hunt for a "leftist Joe Rogan" is, it is (to use a shopworn phrase), "directionally correct." Democrats suck at getting their message out, and that exacts a high electoral cost. (more)

MSM, status-quo media, Big Media?

Democrats Lost the Propaganda War. The intra-Democratic argument over what should be done following their loss in 2024 goes on. Bernie Sanders is arguing for working-class populism. Matt Yglesias has been flogging a “Common Sense Manifesto” arguing for Bill Clinton–style triangulation. (more)

writer

book by Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town movement. From 2011. (more)

In The Stack (pub 2016), Benjamin H Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/stack (more)

Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive – meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience.[1][2] Other ways of knowing, such as intuition, introspection, or religious faith, are rejected or considered meaningless. Although the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of Western thought, modern positivism was first articulated in the early 19th century by Auguste Comte.[3][4] His school of sociological positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to scientific laws.[5] After Comte, positivist schools arose in logic, psychology, economics, historiography, and other fields of thought. Generally, positivists attempted to introduce scientific methods to their respective fields. Since the turn of the 20th century, positivism, although still popular, has declined under criticism within the social sciences by antipositivists and critical theorists, among others, for its alleged scientism, reductionism, overgeneralizations, and methodological limitations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism

David Émile Durkheim (/ˈdɜːrkhaɪm/;[1] French: [emil dyʁkɛm] or [dyʁkajm]; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.[2][3] Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with no how societies can maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are much less universal, and in which new social institutions have come into being. Durkheim's conception of the scientific study of society laid the groundwork for modern sociology, and he used such scientific tools as statistics, surveys, and historical observation in his analysis of suicides in Roman Catholic and Protestant groups... Durkheim was preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. Refining the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, he promoted what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For Durkheim, sociology was the science of institutions, understanding the term in its broader meaning as the "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity,"[5] with its aim being to discover structural social facts. As such, Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic[i] in the sense that sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the study of specific actions of individuals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim

same as social capital?

Sex, smoking, and social stratification are three very different social phenomena. And yet, argues sociologist Randall Collins, they and much else in our social lives are driven by a common force: interaction rituals. Interaction Ritual Chains is a major work of sociological theory that attempts to develop a “radical microsociology.” It proposes that successful rituals create symbols of group membership and pump up individuals with emotional energy, while failed rituals drain emotional energy. Each person flows from situation to situation, drawn to those interactions where their cultural capital gives them the best emotional energy payoff. Thinking, too, can be explained by the internalization of conversations within the flow of situations; individual selves are thoroughly and continually social, constructed from the outside in. The first half of Interaction Ritual Chains is based on the classic analyses of Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead, and Erving Goffman and draws on micro-sociological research on conversation, bodily rhythms, emotions, and intellectual creativity. The second half discusses how such activities as sex, smoking, and social stratification are shaped by interaction ritual chains. ISBN:9780691123899 https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691123899/interaction-ritual-chains?srsltid=AfmBOooxAswj6t9GagsF2cIX7CrFivXBsSr9La8JIgqXY5NQZsGmuD_P

Randall Collins (born July 29, 1941) is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing... He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. Collins's publications include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), which analyzes the network of philosophers and mathematicians for over two thousand years in both Asian and Western societies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Collins (more)

Matt Yglesias: A Common Sense Democrat manifesto. This is a column I am writing because Kamala Harris lost the election, but it’s not a column about “why Harris lost.” An honest assessment of why Democrats lost has to acknowledge that 90 percent of the explanation is the inflation-driven anti-incumbent trend that has hit essentially every rich country around the world. (more)

Jon Stewart Tears Apart Dems’ ‘Idiotic’ Project 2029 Plan. Jon Stewart is not impressed with the Democratic Party’s plan to craft a Project 2029, which he said will just be a “a rehash of all the consultant driven, careful nonsense” that caused them to lose the presidency to Donald Trump. (more)