Life at Wal-Mart - Boing Boing
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/01/life-at-walmart.html

Life at Wal-Mart

Wal*Mart isn't the devil? <gasp>

How about a different opinoin on those Wal-Mart jobs.

he seems surprised that the people who work at WalMart aren't ogres, and he completely ignores the fact that the writings about conditions at WM may have led to the improvements that he sees

By Christopher Hitchens

What the author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic crisis by Christopher Hitchens

YES

What is fragile should break early while it is still small.

N.N. Taleb's ideas about how to avoid financial black swans in the future, based principally on greater regulation (regulating to help people from themselves)

"No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."

1基の7.62mm機関銃が非武装の人間にどれほどの脅威か、この記事の記者が知らないはずはないだろう

Johann Hari on the motivations behind the Somali pirates.

There's a lot more to understand about Somalia... http://tinyurl.com/cfrrpf (via @Xtal)

True? Somali "pirates" are defending illegal fishing

Preciso ler assim que tiver tempo

Eric Hobsbawm: Whatever ideological logo we adopt, the shift from free market to public action needs to be bigger than politicians grasp

"Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left."

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

How Goldman Sachs Has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation Since the Great Depression" The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

They use the same playbook over and over again: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. When it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again.

What's wrong with America? Here's one thing...

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what&#39;s in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Fun to play if you're bored. You get to be a pirate!!

Wired Magazine's game about the business of Somali pirating; see related article published in Wired, "An Economic Analysis of the Somali Pirate Business Model." Commentary at http://jag.lcc.gatech.edu/blog/2009/07/cutthroat-capitalism.html

"You are a pirate commander staked with $50,000 from local tribal leaders and other investors. Your job is to guide your pirate crew through raids in and around the Gulf of Aden, attack and capture a ship, and successfully negotiate a ransom."

See the latest multimedia and applications including videos, animations, podcasts, photos, and slideshows on Wired.com

You are a pirate commander staked with $50,000 from local tribal leaders and other investors. Your job is to guide your pirate crew through raids in and around the Gulf of Aden, attack and capture a ship, and successfully negotiate a ransom.

ABD'de gelir adaletsizliği tüm zamanların rekorunu kırdı

US statistics: -top .01% own 6% of wealth - top 10% own 50% of wealth

from the page: "Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. .. Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000. As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level that's "higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the 'roaring" 1920s.'""

surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. ....As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages

It is difficult to sympathize with these people, their comments laced with snobbery and petulance. But you can understand their shock: Their world has been turned on its head. After years of enjoying favorable tax rates, they are facing an administration that wants to redistribute their wealth. Their industry is being reordered—no one knows what Wall Street will look like in a few years. They are anxious, and their anxiety is making them mad.

Wall Street people are not moral idiots (most of them, anyway)—it’s not as if they’ve never pondered the fairness of their enormous salaries. “One of my relatives is a doctor, we’re both well-educated, hardworking people. And he certainly didn’t make the amount of money I made,” a former Bear Stearns senior managing director tells me. “I would be the first person to tell you his value to society, to humanity, is far greater than anything that went on in the Bear Stearns building.”

In a witch hunt, the witches have feelings, too. As populist rage has erupted around the country, stoked by canny politicians, an opposite rage has built on Wall Street and other arenas where the wealthy hold sway. Its expression is more furtive and it’s often mixed with a kind of sublimated shame, but it can be every bit as vitriolic.

IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone

As the privileged class loses its privileges, a collective moan rises from the canyons of Wall Street.

It was the culture of what some called IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone,”

financial crisis

Great article -- recommended by Jeremy Shapiro. One part of the argument: the fallacy of the belief in diversification and complexity.

Very interesting article about the causes of the current crisis.

By Jerry Z. Muller Thursday, January 29, 2009 Major recessions are characterized by something novel. Opacity and pseudo-objectivity created the crisis today.

A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.

an insane article, on this day there were videos of tent camps in Sacramento, CA filled with people who had lost jobs. The editorial is by Michael Boskin

best. black friday. ever.

stampede

A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an "out-of-control" mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said.

Great article

Must read: excellent post on "the media hologram" and existence

A bit naive in his discussion of free markets, but otherwise a great article.

First you will experience boredom, then comes an internal psychic violence and anger, much like the experience of zazen, or sitting meditation, as the layers of your mind conditioning peel away. Don't quit, keep at it, endure it, to the end. And when you return you will find that deeply experiencing a non-conditioned reality changes things forever. What you have experienced will animate whatever intellectual life you have developed. Or negate much of it. But in serious, intelligent people, experiencing non-manufactured reality usually gives lifelong meaning and insight to the work. You will have experienced the eternal verities of the world and mankind at ground zero. And you will find that the healthy social structures our well intentioned Western minds seek are already inherent in the psyche of mankind, but imprisoned. And the startling realization that you and I are the unknowing captors.

And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.

Psychology and what it might be good for considering the state of the world

Video - CNBC.com

Intense reaction by some financial analysts in Wallstreet to the current plans

Rick Santelli expresses outrage at the prospect of government rewarding bad behavior.

"CNBC's Rick Santelli and the traders on the floor of the CME Group express outrage. . ." It's good to see and hear people who are appropriately angry. Also, note the paternalistic, faux-aristocratic comments of the other anchors, though; particularly how they try to paint a dissenting, informed, concerned, and eloquent citizen as a demagogue stirring up, "mob rule."

"Capitalism (in addition to being a lot of other things) is the way people get rich simply for being rich."

The economy is as great an example as any of a program that not only got out of control, but became so prevalent - so accepted - that we came to take it for granted. We think of the economy and its rules as given circumstances, when they are actually constructions. In brief, the money we use is just one kind of money. Invented in the Renaissance, and protected with laws banning other kinds of money, it has very particular biases that lead to almost inevitable outcomes.

Economy's as great an example as any of a program that not only got out of control, but became so prevalent - so accepted - that we came to take it for granted. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.boingboing.net%2F2008%2F09%2F23%2Fwhat-went-wrong.html

Meanwhile, local currencies had the opposite bias of centralized currency. Local currencies lost value over time. They were really just receipts on the amount of grain that farmer had brought to the grain store. Since some of that grain was lost to rats or water, and since the grain store had to be paid, money devalued each year. This meant the money was biased towards being spent. That's why reinvestment in infrastructure as a percent of total revenue was so high in the late Middle Ages. It's why they built those cathedrals. They were local efforts, by people looking to invest their abundant wealth into real assets for their communities' future. (Cathedrals were built to attract pilgrims and tourism.) Since the purpose of the Renaissance innovations was to keep the currently wealthy wealthy, the currency was biased to favor those who had it - and could mete it out at high interest rates to those who needed it for their transactions.

Money can be just as open source as any other operating system. It used to be.

explaning the american economic crisis

"They work, what, 27 hours in a good week" , "19 holidays a month" Huuuuu, 41 hours a week and 11 holidays a year: http://www.touteleurope.fr/fr/actions/social/emploi-protection-sociale/presentation/comparatif-le-temps-de-travail-dans-l-ue.html

Viewpoint: As Washington rushes to nationalize troubled parts of the economy, the inescapable reality is that we're all French now

Viewpoint: As Washington rushes to nationalize troubled parts of the economy, the inescapable reality is that we\'re all French now

Article discusses how socialist the US has become, despite conservative's contempt for the concept.