Mammon category archive
Abdicating the Common Good 0
There’s an excellent and entertaining science fiction book series called “Traders Tales” set in a future in which corporations own everything, including planets. (You can find the audio books at Scribl.)
It starts when the narrator’s mother, a college professor employed by the corporation that owns her planet, dies in an accident. As he no longer has a tie the planet, the owning corporation tells him he has to leave, thus starting his journey through space and the experiences that form the series. Refreshingly, the story focuses on day-to-day life aboard a space freighter, not on Star Wars-like war and adventure.
It is not a dystopian tale, as were Brave New World or 1984, but I always found premise to be creepy. Under corporate ownership, as under Republican governance, there is no such thing as the common good; there is only mammon.
Will Bunch suggests those days may be closer than you think.
Profiteers of Misery 0
Part One.
Part Two:
Aside:
Brodock is quite correct about doctors’ not knowing how much health care costs. When I told my doctor how much one prescription he gave me cost, he nearly fell off his chair. It was almost 10 times the cost of an equivalent over-the-counter nutritional supplement. He okayed my using the OTC product.
It’s All about the Algorithm 0
Anne Applebaum explains.
I don’t agree with her wholeheartedly, because she doesn’t differentiate between the actions of Facebook and those of Facebook posters, nor does she remark on the credulousness of the American Facebook user. Nevertheless, as regards how Facebook and other anti-social media platforms manipulate the material that Facebook users see when they log in, I submit that her piece is worth a read. Said manipulation may not be “publishing,” but at the very least it is some form of “polishing.”
A snippet:
At the same time, Facebook has declared itself free of responsibility: The company continues to argue that it is not legally liable for material that appears on its platform because it is not a “publisher,” even though it behaves in every other way like a publisher, including by collecting advertising revenue that used to go to publishers. The result is that anyone who seeks to spread false information on Facebook or any other social-media site is, in practice, no longer bound by laws on libel or false advertising that were explicitly designed to stop them.
The Snaring Economy 0
At the San Francisco Chronicle, Chirag Asaravala wonders whether there is dark side to the “there’s an app for that” model of employment. A snippet:
(snip)
They are, in fact, the signs of emerging oppression and growing social stratification. These app-based services are virtual canaries in the coal mine of a country that is foundering and struggling to make meaningful work for its young people.
Republican Core Values 0
Atrios sums them up.
The Return of Snake Oil 0
At the San Francisco Chronicle, Lisa Fullam exposes the duplicity behind Donald Trump’s advocacy for “the right to try” unproven “medical” treatments.
