A Christmas Gift from Marcus Aurelius

Producing quality goods that aren't addictive or obsoleted in a few years--there's no money in that, fool. Get real. You want to get rich, "invest" in a bet in the casino. Is placing a bet in a casino an "investment"? Absolutely! An "investment" is now defined as a wager, often leveraged, at a gaming table in the casino. Anything that offers...

From low-Earth orbit, we see only the mighty sprawl of immense power. The internal gearing driving contradictory dynamics is buried beneath the grandeur and the euphoria. The consensus holds that things are looking up as the mighty forces of technology, political change and the market are all in confluence, reinforcing each other in a New...

If we study the problems outside the force-field of mythological beliefs, we find that there are no systemic solutions, there are only partial, local solutions. The status quo rests on a foundational belief that all problems, regardless of their nature, can be solved by technology, the market or the government (i.e. the state), or some...

When 21% interest rate credit cards are the only thing keeping the lid on awakening and revolt, that's not a sustainable fix. The easy credit, high interest rate swindle has been a financial feature of the landscape for so long it's rarely examined for what it is: not just a reliably profitable swindle, but as a safety valve for a broken...

That's the problem with deploying play-acting as "solutions:" play-acting doesn't actually fix the problems at the source, it simply lets the problems run to failure. By now, we all know the name of the game is narrative control: we no longer face problems directly and attempt to solve them at their source, we play-act "solutions" that leave...