Reading

Created
Mon, 28/07/2025 - 00:30
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory […]
Created
Sun, 27/07/2025 - 23:24

Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their products or pay for access to their services – their core focus. The focus has instead turned towards the stock price.

Their real clients, the entities they really care about, are the stockholders. Reasons are many, perhaps one of them being that people making decisions tend to own stock options or have bonuses tied to stock performance of the companies they run.

This means that for a large, established tech company the product or service it offers does not matter all that much anymore. It needs to be just barely good enough to keep people using it. The easiest way to do this is some form of a monopoly.

Monopoly is the business model of Silicon Valley, and they are not even shy about that.

Created
Sun, 27/07/2025 - 17:55
The government’s proposed new rules will allow a flood of toxic chemicals to be sold in the UK. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  23rd July 2025 It’s what the extreme right of the Tory party wanted from Brexit: to tear down crucial public protections, including those that defend us from the most brutal […]
Created
Sat, 26/07/2025 - 03:40
Uber started in 2009. It incurred losses every year until 2023 except for a profit in 2019 which was due to selling subsidiaries in various countries. Numbers before the IPO are difficult to obtain, but it lost 31.5 billion from 2016 to 2022. Let’s assume a loss of equal to funding during the pre-IPO period, […]
Created
Sat, 26/07/2025 - 03:00

Gather round, fellow diners, and feast your eyes upon the meal that sits before me, for I have ascended to a new level of gastronomy. As you gape in awe at my order, I welcome you with open arms as an acolyte ready to worship at the altar of my culinary majesty.

For I, your friend and newly anointed food deity, have forgone the customary side order of french fries and instead ordered a side salad.

You wonder whether the whispers of the personal trainer I often speak of factored into my decision to replace the beloved yet calorie-rich french fry with a bowl of spring mix bathed in balsamic vinaigrette. They did not. Rather, after being yelled at while sweat poured from every pore in my body for an hour straight this morning, I am more than deserving of a serious carb load. Yet willpower is a formidable tool in my belt of dietary supremacy, and, as such, this mélange of leafy greens graces my plate.

Created
Sat, 26/07/2025 - 01:06
To understand real-world ‘non-routine’ decisions and unforeseeable changes in behaviour, ergodic probability distributions are of no avail. In a world full of genuine uncertainty — where real historical time rules the roost — the probabilities that ruled the past are not necessarily those that will rule the future. When we cannot accept that the observations, […]
Created
Fri, 25/07/2025 - 23:00

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A rotating guest column in which writers reexamine critically unacclaimed works of art.

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Weekend at Bernie’s is about being wealthy in America: babes, boats, fraud. According to my mother, Weekend at Bernie’s qualifies as a movie, not a film. In 1989, when the movie hit theaters, it flopped. The critic Roger Ebert said the twist wasn’t funny enough to carry the story forward. He hated it. But what he didn’t see, may he RIP, was that the one-note, unapologetically crass materialism was worth the rental price of seeing it through to the end.