Welcome back, stranger. Remember, its about their needs, not yours. From Q4 2022 through Q1 2024 the tech industry has seen a shit-ton of layoffs. These are due to a combination of factors: The end of the ZIRP: Zero Interest Rate PolicyZIRP era, higher interest rates means investors demand profitability (instead of growth) from portfolio companies. In 2017, Section 174…
#economics
9 posts
25 Feb 2024
27 Mar 2021
Readers of my site may have noticed the many references to Guy Debord in my writing over the years, and especially since 2016. This is largely because I’ve been writing a new edition of his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle adapted for our present moment. This edition is out now on the web. A hardcover edition will be…
5 Jun 2020
Looting is an obvious response to the glorification of consumer products— commodities in a society that worships conspicuous consumption. The very act of looting is resistance to the celebrity status of these commodities and what they imply: inanimate objects celebrated for the image, status, and privilege they create, and the way that privilege is assumed to confer the protection of…
15 Mar 2020
A central issue of contestation is elasticity versus discipline, elasticity for me and discipline for you, alchemy of banking and money funding for me, austerity and borrowing/payment for you. Like 2009, the (coming/arriving) financial collapse of 2020 will reveal the asymmetry of power between the financial sector and the rest of the economy, and it’ll especially highlight how the financial…
16 Apr 2019
Gibsons “San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide” is worth reading, his take is that San Francisco has become too successful… inevitable to decline into some expensive backwater due to “the rent is too damn high”. He paints a compelling vision of the ills of appalling levels of income inequality, the monoculture of white-male-American tech-workers, and the metastasis of the city into the…
30 Mar 2017
Do you work in the tech industry in the Bay Area? You should start learning about, and getting involved in, local housing politics. The prognosis for housing and rent prices is bad, and things are likely going to get worse for tech workers in the Bay, unless we start taking action. I will explain why […]
21 Apr 2014
The Heartbleed bug was really bad for OpenSSL - it let you ask a server a simple question like "How are you" and then have the server tell you anything it wants (password data, private keys that could be used to decrypt all traffic), and the server would have no idea it was happening. A […]
6 Mar 2014
Lets Start With What the USD is backed by The USD is no longer backed by gold1, but by a promise that the US Government will pay its debt (in the form of payment the interest on (and sometime redeem) government securities when due). If these payments are not made to the debt holders (Corporations, China, treasury-bond holders) then a…
28 Mar 2013
This American Life is an excellent podcast, but occasionally puts out episodes on subjects I don't care for - fiction, reminisces about home life, etc. There is one heuristic you should use for filtering American Life podcasts: listen to the podcasts they release that tell one story for the whole hour. Example whole-hour podcasts, that […]