Pluralistic: 14 Sep 2022 The Chokepoint Capitalism tour!


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Pluralistic: 13 Sep 2022 Survival of the Richest


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Pluralistic: 12 Sep 2022 Spotify is a ripoff, a Spotify exclusive


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Sound Money

The best money is social, not personal.

Several rows of old rulers and yardsticks, distorted as through a lens.

The inflation hawks have a point: inflation is genuinely destabilizing. When working peopleā€™s purchasing power declines, they rightly worry that heating their homes, putting food on the table, or commuting to work will cause them to fall into debt, and, eventually, poverty.

But where the inflation hawks go wrong is in blaming ā€œmoney printingā€ for inflation. Itā€™s true that when demand exceeds supply, prices go up, but the nutrition, shelter and transport are not luxury goods whose prices are spiking because we gave ordinary people more money than they deserved.

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Pluralistic: 10 Sep 2022 American healthcare did a fuckery, the White House has a plan for Big Tech big-data


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Pluralistic: 09 Sep 2022 How to die without getting rooked


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Pluralistic: 08 Sep 2022 Billionaires as policy-failure factories; In Real Life, in real life


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Pluralistic: 07 Sep 2022 We published an Audible Exclusive about the monopolistic abuses of Audible


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Parenting and Phones, an Empowering Approach

Wisdom from ā€œBehind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing)ā€ by Emily Weinstein and CarrieĀ James

DImage; Jiyoung kim/CC BY-SA 4.0 (modified); Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

I am the father of a 14 year old, and it is wild. We have our good days and our bad ones, and the lockdown was hard for all of us, but I learn new stuff from my kid every single day.

Iā€™ve been writing about the intersection of parenting and my kidā€™s digital life since she was two years old, and from the start, Iā€™ve been clear on one thing: itā€™s impossible to completely control how my kid uses digital tech, and so the best I can hope for is to teach her to be as safe as possible, and to cultivate a trusting relationship with her so that when (not if) she gets in over her head, sheā€™ll come to me so I can help her figure it out.

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Car Wars

The Real TrolleyĀ Problem

A Times Square traffic jam; all the carsā€™ windscreens have been filled with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The background has been filled with a Matrix ā€œcode-waterfallā€ effect.
joiseyshowaa/CC BY-SA 2.0 (modified); Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

Authorā€™s Note: This short story was originally commissioned by Deakin College as part of an AI ethics course; they have since take it down. This is its new home. For a nonfiction analysis of the problems set forth herein, see my Guardian column on the subject. Hereā€™s an audio edition.

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