A common criticism of my arguments against crypto is that they assume too much knowledge or that my prose is too dense. So a friend challenged me to rewrite ‘The Case Against Crypto’ using mostly the 1500 Simple English words and short sentences version that perhaps a well-read twelve year old could read in a 6th grade history book from the future. About the financial disaster of the 2020s. --- The economics of bitcoin were also bad. When people use money they want to buy things with it quickly and they want to know that the price of the thing they want to buy won’t change drastically. Bitcoin is bad at both of these things. Bitcoin was bad at being stable money because the technology was not designed to do that, because it didn’t want to have a central bank. This was unfixable because the entire project was based on a bad idea. […] Crypto was a story about giving people new money, but instead it just stole people’s old money and destroyed their lives. Unfortunately the world figured out crypto was a bad idea far too late.

A way of seeing wealth, with context. One pixel = $1,000. By Matt Korostoff.

How did a person grow up in a society governed by financial institutions and never get taught how they work? --- Navigating life in this century revolves around our ability to interact with an interlocking series of bureaucracies run according to their own precise rules and delicate timescales. No matter how consumer-focussed these institutions are or deem themselves to be, you will, in the end, have to follow their procedures in order to perform tasks that are essential, unavoidable, or necessary stops in the pursuit of your own happiness. We all know that we often need to look out for our elderly friends, neighbours, and relatives, who learned to navigate a very different maze, and sometimes struggle to keep up with the rules of this one. That’s because it’s hard. It’s a complicated business. And we all know how rubbish a bad interaction with a corporation makes us feel. The recurring term, chosen spontaneously by thousands of callers, is nightmare. […] This inner machinery reveals the billions of ordinary “consumers” who use Facebook to be Romans in their baths: enjoying the futuristic technology of adjustable plumbing and heating, blissfully unaware of the Thracian slave shovelling coal into a boiler just a few feet below. Except, in this case, the facility we are all using and responsible for keeping alive influences elections, convinces people to join the far right, pushes Britain to leave the European Union. […] As stable work has started to disappear, call centre work and other customer service has remained one of the best options for entry-level work. Nearly everyone in my office works there because they needed stable hours and a guaranteed income, and nothing else available to us offered those things. Nearly everyone is under 30. And as impenetrably designed digital services take the place of more and more straightforward face-to-face interactions, more and more things will be contested, and thus explained, assessed, queried, and escalated to a payment expert. Maybe you’re cool with that. Personally, it sounds pretty dystopian to me, considering that those interactions are nearly all immiserating. […] If you must contact a bank or an insurer, do so knowing that it has been made impossible by design for you to talk to anyone with real authority. When you scream down the phone you’ve ruined my life, your system error means I can’t get a mortgage, you will rarely if ever be screaming at anyone who could help you. This design places those with power and responsibility safely away from the impact of their actions, and pits two enormous groups of stressed-out working people against each other. Rather than resolve conflicts in a constructive or efficient way, we are forced to abuse and hate each other as proxies. […] If somebody has to be traumatized in order for Facebook to function as a business, then Facebook doesn’t function as a business. If somebody has to be mistreated and dehumanized for a business to function, then it doesn’t. […] I’m not sure if many know this, but a great many people every day, in this society we live in, destroy their finances on Amazon or ASOS, buying four pairs of $200 trainers on credit when they live on minimum wage and support a family. I can’t say how many, all I can say is that I speak to around five of them a day. Who failed them? How did a person grow up in a society governed by financial institutions and never get taught how they work?

Should you rent or buy a home? Use our simple rent vs buy calculator to find out which option is best for you.

Now that the rich are no longer required to pay taxes, death has become the sole universal human predicament. [...] Renouncing one’s own greed, understanding oneself as one small participant in the infinitely long conga line of history, is reassuring, as is the idea that you can contribute to the well-being of those who will survive you. In fact it’s the only real (by which I mean, lasting) balm for the fear that is the inevitable companion of life.

A handy guide to financial support for open source. This document aims to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways that people get paid for open source work. Hopefully, projects and contributors will find this helpful in figuring out the best options for them.

Reading this makes me viscerally angry. It’s only my first day, but it’s clear this is not the Burning Man-style celebration of the liberatory potential of decentralization I was promised. This is a locked-room, hard-sell pitch session to a literally captive audience of high-roller crypto investors, whose only escape is the lifeboats. The whole place smells of aftershave and insecurity. But if you want to know how power actually operates in any community, watch the women.

Try to remember that your financial and emotional anxiety is a necessary aspect of an economic system that excels at both producing and consuming it: more anxiety means more work for less money... which means more anxiety. It’s a beast that eats its own shit. The fact that you “knew what you were signing up for” by going into a sometimes-noble profession does not make any of this your fault, or in any way diminish your right to feel awful about it. There is no job that grants nobility to economic precarity — struggling does not build character, it serves no one save those who profit from our immiseration.

A new type of Payola is taking place on Spotify, with artists using third-party services to get added to influential playlists, and the company is inadvertently paying for it.

The true believers won’t stop until they’ve remade the world. Some of it will be thrilling. Some of it will keep us up at night. [...] What Silicon Valley loves most isn’t the products, or the platforms underneath them, but markets. “Figure out the business model later” was the call of the early commercial internet. The way you monetize vast swaths of humanity is by creating products that people use a lot—perhaps a search engine such as Google or a social network like Facebook. You build big transactional web platforms beneath them that provide amazing things, like search results or news feeds ranked by relevance, and then beneath all that you build marketplaces for advertising—a true moneymaking machine. If you happen to create an honest-to-god marketplace, you can get unbelievably rich.

Each year people accept salaries less than what they deserve. It seems like employers always have the upper hand, but that doesn't have to be the case.

So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it’s “unfair” but if you do it in real life it’s “capitalism”? Monopoly’s original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. […] When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.

This is one of the most important things I’ve ever read. You’re a business. You have a price. You’ve (hopefully) given thought to that price. If someone can’t afford it, they really won’t be mad. Besides: If they are mad about your price, do you really want them as a client?

Toyota’s emphasis on efficiency proved transformative for the Food Bank.

But the thing about this particular brand of low-key wealth is that it can lead to a false sense of self, on both a micro and a macro level. Consumption is still consumption even if it's less conspicuous. Class may be harder to see here, but that doesn't make it any less real. Mark Zuckerberg's still a billionaire, even if he's wearing a hoodie and jeans. And if you don't feel or look rich, you don't necessarily feel the same sense of obligation that a traditional rich person does or should: Noblesse oblige is, after all, dependent on a classical idea of who is and is not the nobility. As that starts to fall away, obligation — to culture, to the future, to each other — begins to disappear, too.

Bitcoin isn’t tied to any commodity—besides trust. As a statement on the global economy, Bitcoin is hilarious. As a currency for the disenfranchised and distrustful, it’s as serious as can be.

An anonymous writer explains his adventurous life with dangerous NGO work.

We can and should support the companies we love with our money. Companies can and should have balanced streams of income so that they’re not solely dependent on just one. We all should consider the business models of the companies we trust with our data. But we should not assume that, just because we pay a company they’ll treat us better, or that if we’re not paying that the company is allowed to treat us like shit. Reality is just more complicated than that. What matters is how companies demonstrate their respect for their customers. We should hold their feet to the fire when they demonstrate a lack of respect.

for the majority of small bands, touring is a necessary out-of-pocket promotional expense to drive sales for a new release, not a source of profit to offset sales. Not to mention the fact that there’s virtually no radio support for touring acts in all but the biggest cities, thanks to Clear Channel and deregulation leading to the outsourcing of local DJs. I think a lot of musicians love playing live in front of crowds, but hate everything else about touring, which is both financially and emotionally draining.

Well, some snotty kids got $15 million. At least the people who founded the culture that made them rich are also living on the high hog, right? Not quite. A lot of the originators of rap music — many of whose lyrics provide part of the content that RapGenius' business model is based on — are far from rich. Kool Herc, who maybe more than any one person can be said to have invented hip-hop, can't afford required surgery, and when these kids are parading around in suits and fresh kicks it leaves a bad taste in a lot peoples' mouths.

Sometimes music listeners talk as if artists are running the show: there’s a stage, and these musicians are standing on it, addressing us. And then sometimes musicians talk as if listeners are running the show: they make music for their own pleasure, and then a vast and fickle public decides whether anyone will be interested, and what chance the music will get to continue. I wonder sometimes if the internet has exploded the former impulse and maybe diminished our memory of the latter…

Successful, but how successful, and to whom, and what does that mean in terms of getting along in the world?

A history of Tumblr and the monetization issue it faces.

To assess a film's odds of success (because even crowdfunders don’t want to back a loser), a prospective funder would want to know what people in the know—who are part of the “industry” in one way or another—make of it. This is the point often missed by those hailing Kickstarter as a revolutionary project that could emancipate the artists: What defines potential “success” for their film is still very much defined by the industry heavyweights.

Breaking down the Amanda Palmer and her crowdsourced-musicians situation.

"Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions," wrote Lindsay Zoladz in her Pitchfork review of their latest album, Bloom. Switch a few words around, and this perfect evocation could have emanated from DDB's pitch meeting to Volkswagen. Which is not to belittle Zoladz's criticism, nor to build up ad-speak as any more than means-to-an-end capitalist labor. Instead, this connection highlights the idea that critics and marketers often seek the same positive criteria in art.

Instagram succeeded for many good reasons, including its design, its viral qualities, its simplicity, and the fact that its engineers focused so obsessively on making sure that it works all the time. Part of its success, no doubt, is the fact that it was just in the right place, at the right time, with the right, crowd-pleasing mix of features.

On why the ‘Zombies, Run!’ is $8 instead of $1, and why it works.

Kickstarter cofounder responds to Clay Johnson's inaccurate statistics and conclusions about Kickstarter out-funding the NEA this year.

1. Get organized. 2. Start an emergency fund. 3. Rebalance your 401(k). 4. Develop a debt plan. 5. Be optimistic.