Why Are We Doing This to Ourselves?’ Readers Respond to the Threat of Automation New York Times. José M: “First highlight: ‘Some readers questioned capitalism, and whom it’s supposed to serve:’ *gasp*”
U.S. Quietly Drops Bombshell: Wall Street Banks Have $2 Trillion European Exposure Wall Street on Parade
War on Cash by Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET. Originally published at Wolf Street
In the wake of the attack on the Christmas market in Berlin in December, the European Commission granted customs and police authorities sweeping new powers to seize cash or precious metals carried by “suspect individuals” entering the EU. People carrying more than €10,000 euros in cash already have to declare this at customs when entering the EU. The new rules would allow authorities to seize money (or precious metals or bitcoin) below that threshold “where there are suspicions of criminal activity.”
Derek Parfit, who died at age 74 on Sunday evening, was not the most famous philosopher in the world. But he was among the most brilliant, and his papers and books have had a profound, incalculably vast impact on the study of moral philosophy over the past half century.
It was the latest step in the War on Cash. The powers that want to kill off cash include private and central banks, fintech firms, Silicon Valley magnates like Tim Cook and Bill Gates, telecom behemoths, credit card giants, assorted NGOs, a bewildering alphabet soup of UN agencies and many national governments. They all have their own disparate motives for taking out physical money.
How Our Sense Of Time Became Defined By Economics
“Time’s unknowable perils contributed to the flourishing of economic thought. But then something interesting happened. The creature became the creator: The economy re-invented time. Or, to put things less obliquely, the age of exploration and the industrial revolution completely changed the way people measure time, understand time, and feel and talk about time.”
Lessons learned over the break how to have your second third cocktail
More than one-third of schoolchildren are homeless in shadow of Silicon Valley Guardian
“THERE IS AN IMPLICIT DEGREE OF TRUST AMONG ACADEMICS.” During Sabbatical, UC-Berkeley Professor Rented Home On ‘The Airbnb For Academics’ To Visiting Professor, Who Used California Law To Squat In Home Without Paying Rent
‘She’s now with Carrie’Hollywood star Debbie Reynolds dies of suspected stroke after saying she wanted to be with her daughter Carrie Fisher Telegraph. One often reads about bereaved spouses dying of natural causes within hours or days of the death of their partner. I can’t think of a case of it happening with a parent ... Life sentence ...“THERE IS AN IMPLICIT DEGREE OF TRUST AMONG ACADEMICS.” During Sabbatical, UC-Berkeley Professor Rented Home On ‘The Airbnb For Academics’ To Visiting Professor, Who Used California Law To Squat In Home Without Paying Rent
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to create and maintain an up-to-date reference work.Principal Editor: Edward N. Zalta.
“Welcome to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up-to-date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, our dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research. You can cite fixed editions that are created on a quarterly basis and stored in our Archives (every entry contains a link to its complete archival history, identifying the fixed edition the reader should cite). The Table of Contents lists entries that are published or assigned. The Projected Table of Contents also lists entries which are currently unassigned but nevertheless projected…”
Unsettled #47, Ireland’s Eye, Trinity Bay (1998)
Polite behavior gives way to fear and anger and self-destruction. Bad decisions followed by poor choices. Mostly choices driven by their preference to avoid pain, problems and complications. Their life had so far been nice, orderly, and pretty. They would very much like it to continue to be nice, orderly, and pretty. Why should something that happened in a matter of seconds, something meaningless, odd, so totally not them, not at all what they wanted, be allowed to impact their life ...
Those burnt tongue moments – Chuck Palahniuk in interview
“Words are the first step we take to turn intentions into reality”, declares American author Chuck Palahniuk. “All our vows, –...Read More- Rising Tide
When Roseau finds herself in despair one night (a mood which begins with the classic Rhysian line, “Oh God, I’m going to think, don’t let me think”) it is Fifi who comes to comfort her. At the heart of the story is Roseau’s view of Fifi which is never made explicit. Does she see a fearful presentiment of her own future? Or does she adore Fifi’s ability to find joy in life and live with the consequences? (When her gigolo leaves her we are told “head up, she faced a hostile and sneering world.”)
Certainly ageing seems to be a preoccupation in all these stories. In ‘Vienne’, a much longer, more impressionistic story, the tone is set from the opening lines:
“Funny how it’s slipped away, Vienna. Nothing left but a few snapshots.”
In ‘Tea with an Artist’ the revelation comes at the end, as the narrator suddenly sees something of her youth in the elderly wife of the artist:
“And then I remembered the way in which she had touched his cheek with her big hand. There was in that movement knowledge, and a certain sureness: as it were the ghost of a time when her business in life had been the consoling of men.” 1st Amen
The Trauma of the Gifted Child
Somewhere a child is being hidden. The time is mid-July, 1942, and the first great roundup of Jews—more than thirteen thousand foreign Jews in all, including four thousand children—has begun in Paris, to be followed by more arrests days later in the unoccupied zones. A small boy—"born in Prague at the worst possible moment, four months before Hitler came to power," he recalls in the memoir he will grow up to write—has been living for two years in Néris, a resort town in France known for its waters, with his parents. Before this, the family has been continually on the run, trying to flee across the Hungarian border by car before discovering that the Germans had already occupied Hungary, and then settling in Paris, where the father, once vice president of a large German insurance company in Czechoslovakia, studies to be a cheesemaker and the mother a beautician. They have learned to keep their heads low, in hopes of going undetected by the glare of the Nazi searchlight. The boy has grown up in the assimilated context of the Central European Jewish bourgeoisie: "We observed none of the rules of life that Orthodoxy laid down, celebrated none of the holidays, respected none of the customs." The first song he was taught when given piano lessons was a funeral march played in the German army and performed at ceremonial occasions during the Third Reich. Historian
