What is the Color of Irony?

One author suggests that the color of irony is lavender, but I would suggest that today, anyway, it ought to be black. Black Friday, you see. To mark this holiday manqué the New York Times (whose editors certainly have a sense of humor) chose to feature on the front page a story about the State [...]

Dusting Off a Marxist Concept

The concept I have in mind is “the means of production.” When we speak of the ownership of the means of production, what most people envisage is ownership of factories and equipment. In reality the notion goes beyond the ownership of stuff and includes control over people and also more dynamic structures, such as distribution [...]

Innovation – No. Degeneration – Yes.

Just how much innovation is really possible in a simple transaction under which one man borrows money and another one lends it? All financial transactions ultimately reduce to a simple formula: I provide you money—and you pay me the money back, plus-some. The plus-some is my reward for letting you have the money. What more [...]

Curious Cockfight

Battles or uproars in the Media tend to remind me—because they’re so visible—that all of us inhabit artificial worlds, worlds produced by habit and assumptions. The dark aspect of this is that we think ourselves immune, but we’re just as benighted as everyone else.
The example, this time, comes from CNN. There Lou Dobbs has apparently [...]

Second Life to the Rescue

The other day—the trigger was a New York Times story about real money spent on virtual good (11/7/09)—Brigitte and I had a lots of fun and laughter talking about Second Life, a subscription based virtual reality program that, by happenstance, was not mentioned in the Times article. The Wikipedia article on this game is awesome. [...]

What’s So Special About Afghanistan?

Before I get to that question, just a few facts. The weapons used in the 911 terrorist attacks were three airplanes routinely used by airlines. Nineteen people hijacked those planes. Next, three of the terrorists, all three trained as pilots, crashed the planes. Two went into buildings, the third augured into the ground–thanks to heroic resistance [...]

Morality v. Law

The words morality and ethics both derive from the concept of “customary good behavior.” One word comes from the Latin, the other from the Greek. In our times we prefer to use ethics, e.g., in phrases like “business ethics.” The reason for this is that the Latin word is too closely associated with religion, a [...]

Contract, Custom, and Corruption

It is best to remember that contracts and laws draw their power from enforcement. Our contract-based society absolutely requires (1) a functioning state, (2) a law-enforcement arm, and (3) a judicial apparatus. But what happens in societies where one, two, or even all three of these necessary underpinnings of contact-law are missing?
Well, agreements are still [...]

Incentives versus Integrity

I changed jobs during my career in order to get higher pay, but I have never really “worked for money” nor ever “worked harder” because of so-called incentives. For these reasons I view the current debate about incentives and bonuses as a sign of decadence, unworthy of us as a people. That’s the gist, but [...]

A Benign View of the Internet

One of the useful aspects of our adaptations to this dimension is that bad news always dominate our consciousness whereas the good we take for granted. Thus we don’t exult minute to minute because our heart is beating, but if a period of arrhythmia sets in, look out! We can think of nothing else until [...]