General boycott is to boycott as general strike is to strike. The strike weapon packs little punch in a relatively high wage country such as the United States. The American worker/consumer qua worker is expendable. The American worker/consumer qua consumer is apparently a large part of what’s propping up the global economy. The global business…

Quotations with links “One large problem with selling our private information is the ratchet effect. Once you have divulged a piece of personal information to a party, it is out of your control for all time, since no piece of information is ever forgotten anymore (the ratchet). That party now can sell the information bit…

Quotations with links “I don’t have anything against fiscal responsibility, I just don’t think it’s fundamental enough as a value to go in a tag line–and there are times, like now, when short-term fiscal ‘irresponsibility’ is the most responsible long-term course…”–Shawn Fremstad “If we keep bailing out huge corporations can we please stop pretending that…

“In general, if someone is making a website publicly available, others may freely link to it. That open linking is what makes the web a ‘web.’”–Electronic Frontier Foundation ‘”If you don’t work, you don’t eat” is a core philosophy of today’s economy, and this rule could make a rapid robotic takeover extremely uncomfortable for our…

Book meme Book meme, via EmilySo Bardiac had this meme this morning, and I thought I’d do it. The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Jonathan Strange &…

Concerning the digital divide in America I am an American blogging at a public library. The blog entry you are reading was posted at a public library. It was written at home. The sentence you are now reading was typed in at 7/10/2008 1:52:06 AM (EDT, GMT-4). My trusty USB flash drive is a key…

Everything I know about the Clintons, I learned in high school On May 6, 2008 I voted in my local school board election. This was the first WCS board of education election in which I participated, since becoming a resident of the Warren Community Schools district in 1996. I suppose that makes me something of…

“Without the proletarian Bad Cop of the USSR, the proletarian Good Cop of Social Democracy is doomed.”–JVS “A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy–a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were…

“As you no doubt remember, Cingular was co-owned by BellSouth and SBC, which had been Southwestern Bell and Ameritech, which before that had been Illinois Bell, Wisconsin Bell, Michigan Bell, Ohio Bell, and Indiana Bell. … A couple of years ago Cingular bought AT&T Wireless and renamed it Cingular, but then SBC bought AT&T and…

I thought the past tense of “lead” was spelled “led.” In my recent offline reading of online content, I’ve noticed a tendency toward uses of “led” in this context being outnumbered by uses of “lead” by, let’s say, ten to one. Now I even see the “lead” spelling used utterly consistently (as if by editorial…