tags: capitalism

2001

April

2001 Apr 1
Happy New Year

April is the cruelest month. Spring is teasing me. I hate how desolate the Midwest is, although I wouldn’t mind actually living in Chicago. I finally found a Playstation 2. I had a lot of clever things to say, but I can’t get them to come out.

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2002

January

2002 Jan 10
It Wasn't That the World Changed…

More thoughts about Dhalgren and the nature of synchronicity.

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2004

January

2004 Jan 11
grease the wheels

"gotta grease the wheels of the economy to keep it running"
my communist sister declaimed sarcastically as she bought
that new outfit with money that she didn't have
earned from the job that she hadn't been offerred
the paycheck that she wasn't given for the 4 hours of work she did each day
putting it on in full view of the banner of che guevarra
hanging on her bedroom wall

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2007

September

2007 Sep 9
the coming of cold iron

I never watched the original version of “3:10 to Yuma” but I suspect it probably didn’t have the nuances of the remake starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. The plot is relatively straight-forward. Ben Wade, the infamous leader of a band of outlaws that have robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad twenty-two times, finally gets caught. Meanwhile, Dan Evans, a veteran of the Civil War who lost his leg, and a rancher who is being forced off his land by the Southern Pacific Railroad, decides to take the job to bring Ben Wade to justice, by escorting him to the prison train that stops in the town of Contention. Of course, Wade’s band of outlaws does all they can to save their boss.

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2008

January

2008 Jan 21
avatar: the last airbender

Cartoons on Nickelodeon have always sparked my imagination since I was a little kid. From Dangermouse, to Belle and Sebastian, to the Seven Cities of Gold, I found myself transported to remote times and places.

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2015

October

2015 Oct 23
Pyrimethamine and the Treatment of Toxoplasmosis

I will admit, I haven't really been looking too closely at the antics of Martin Shkreli, founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who is famous for buying the rights to the drug Daraprim (generic: pyrimethamine, used for the treatment of toxoplasmosis in patients with AIDS) and jacking up the price from $13.50/pill to $750/pill.

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2016

January

2016 Jan 4
Income Inequality

"Income inequality" is a neoliberal euphemism for "unjust distribution of wealth".

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2016 Jan 21
Invisible Hand

Anthropomorphizing (theomorphizing?) the free market is insane. The Invisible Hand is just a metaphor for the summation of stochastic processes appearing to have intentionality to the apophenia-susceptible human mind, not a metaphysical description of an actual sapient system really having intentionality. #ChurchOfTheAlmightyDollar

2016 Jan 28
Growth of Capitalist Economies

I honestly don't understand why everyone uses exponential curves for their models when sigmoidal curves seem to better model reality for lots of phenomena: population growth, language change, diffusion of innovation… and perhaps even the growth of capitalist economies.

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March

2016 Mar 19
Generational Warfare

I forgot to post this when it happened but I thought it was important to bookmark it. It's kind of a microcosm of the intergenerational divide that animates a lot of the political debate between the Hillary Clinton camp and the Bernie Sanders camp swirling around in the context of post-modernism/post-colonialism and the increasing recognition of privilege.

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May

2016 May 19
Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance isn't so much about humans vs. bacteria as it is about humans vs. laissez-faire capitalism, specifically Big Ag, but also the health insurance/for-profit health care industrial complex.

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2016 May 19
The Reason People in This Country are Starving

Proponents and GMOs and pesticides like to point out that increased production is the only way to prevent massive starvation. While I am not anti-GMO or anti-pesticide, this is demonstrably false.

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2016 May 27
Antibiotic Resistance and Profit Motive

When you get right down to it, the antibiotic resistance crisis is mostly driven by profitability. It simply isn't profitable to invest all that money in R&D, clinical trials, and marketing of antibiotics. Despite their obvious critical utility, the demand for antibiotics that are effective against multidrug-resistant pathogens is, overall, not very high.

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July

2016 Jul 18
Fix the Distribution System Instead of Just Increasing Yields

Standard disclaimer: I am not anti-science by any means and I do not believe that GMOs are intrinsically toxic but I am wary of those who push GMOs without question and who are quick to label those who are wary of GMOs and Big Ag in general as anti-science, especially if they are (1) worried about a Malthusian catastrophe, (2) think that increasing yields is the only way to prevent starvation, and (3) think that laissez-faire capitalism is the only way to efficiently distribute food.

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