A Lovely Bit of Thinking

This is a piece I stumbled across a few years ago; it’s interesting, especially considering when it was written: 1949. The author was looking back at Europe’s successive troubles and accurately saw the disturbance as an effect of the economics of the industrial revolution. The analysis seems pretty simple to me: imperialism was waning and the vast changes in the European powers’ economies brought on by new industrial processes (in particular, weaponry) created a perfect storm of events that – for a time – discredited capitalism. The Russian revolution was through the process of turning into Stalin’s dictatorship – discrediting communism in turn. Aristocracy, in the form of the family of elite pinheads who destroyed Europe, didn’t look particularly good, either.

[Read more…]

Something Jobs Something Title Something

Game-Master: “You peer over the edge, down into the cave. Below is a huge dragon, lying on a mound of gold.”
Rogue: “Is it asleep?”
Game-Master: “You hear deep rumbling snores.”
Party-Leader: “Great. We sneak back to town and take all the villagers’ gold. Then we sneak back to the cave, and add the villagers’ gold to the dragon’s pile without waking it up. The dragon will create jobs for everyone!”

[Read more…]

My Subversive Thing

I’m slow on the uptake because I usually have my head in the clouds or I’m glaring at some project and not thinking about anything else. But hanging out at pharyngula back in the scienceblogs days helped clue me in to the gender imbalance in tech. (It required a few privilege-checks and beatings)

[Read more…]