Pluralistic: Care Inflation (18 Jan 2023)


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Pluralistic: This "inflation" is different (14 Dec 2022)


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Pluralistic: 27 Oct 2022 Substituting economics for politics is a failure


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Pluralistic: 13 Jun 2022


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Direct: The Problem of Middlemen

Kathryn Judge’s debut book is a hymn to short supply chains.

Back in 2007, I published my second short story collection, Overclocked. I was elated; not just because I’d published another book (the thrill of a new book has yet to pale even today, after dozens of books), but because it was a short-story collection, the kind of book I’d devoured as a kid, the mainstay of writers I’d worshiped, from Harlan Ellison to Spider Robinson to Kate Wilhelm. The publisher was Avalon, which had recently acquired Four Walls Eight Windows, the small press that had published my first short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Selling a book to Four Walls had been its own thrill, as they were publisher to Abbie Hoffman, another writer I’d grown up on.

But then, something weird happened.

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Pluralistic: 06 Jun 2022


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Pluralistic: 17 Mar 2022


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Pluralistic: 16 Mar 2022


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The Byzantine Premium

On the contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy

A pumpkin pie with a slice missing. The pie has been overlaid with a pie-chart, in which the pieces are labelled with an icon of a confused businessman, a dollar sign, a circle with the word “NEW!” in the middle, and a “lotto” logo. The tin beneath the missing slice reveals a section of a glittering Bitcoin.
Jakub-gdPL and Famartin/CC BA-SA 4.0; Delwar Hossain, BD/CC BY 4.0; Jernej Furman/CC BY 2.0 — (modified)

When you write critically about blockchain, Bitcoin, speculation, NFTs and DeFi, you get an earful back. Advocates for these things are…well, aggressive is a polite term for how many believers respond to critiques of their financial/philosophical/political/technological project.

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