Low pay, soaring rents, and cities littered with e-scooters. Welcome to the future. --- But what is less widely acknowledged is how the gig economy interacts with other trends in California and forces unleashed by Silicon Valley—rising housing costs, choked infrastructure—to make life hell for those who live at or near the epicenter of America’s technology industry. Together, they constitute a nightmare vision of what the world would look like if it were run by our digital overlords, as they sit atop a growing underclass that does their shopping and drives their cars—all while barely able to make ends meet. […] When Uber and Lyft announced they would guarantee California drivers a $15.60 minimum wage as an alternative to a new law aimed at curtailing gig companies’ misclassification of workers, Chair Ken Jacobs of U.C. Berkeley’s Labor Center found that the pledge was largely an empty one. Once you take into account drivers’ expenses and unpaid time between rides, their true gross wage would be $5.64 per hour. California’s state minimum wage is $12.00 an hour—far more than what rideshare companies were paying after expenses. […] There’s also evidence that Lyft and Uber, the two most popular ridesharing companies, contribute to a decline in public transit ridership. City governments thus have less incentive to invest in more infrastructure, creating still more negative repercussions for poorer communities and communities of color. In November, voters in San Francisco elected to levy a 1.5 percent tax on rideshares, in a bid to incentivize riders to consider public transit. […] The companies say that e-scooters are a “greener” form of transit than cars, but the evidence is underwhelming. One study published in August in an environmental journal, Environmental Research Letters, posited that whatever emissions electric scooters saved were offset by the greenhouse gas that gig workers expended chasing after scooters to perform maintenance and charging duties. The companies also say that e-scooters encourage a more diverse ridership, but San Francisco authorities reportedly found that e-scooter ridership tended to skew male, wealthy, and Caucasian.

The solution to the growing global food crisis will not be technical; it will be social and political. The Oxfam report offers a good start: The World Bank, which operates under the leadership of a president chosen by the US, should stop financing dodgy land deals in the global south—as it has been doing—and start advising the governments of low-income, food-insecure countries to set up strict protections for smallholder farmers. Further, Oxfam advises, the World Bank should cajole low-income nations to insist that any land deals be structured to ensure that local food security is enhanced by them.

Readability has no right collecting money in my name without my consent. Now, realistically, I have given Readability consent by signing up — but what about other publishers that have not only not signed up, but have actively chosen to not sign up? Is it still OK for Readability to be collecting money in their name? I think not. But how do you solve this problem? I don’t know, but it is a very real problem.

Reflecting on his newly self-released $5 internet-only special. ‘I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.’

“After all, if Starbucks can make a profit by putting its stores right across the street from each other, as it so often does, why couldn't a unique, well-run mom and pop do even better next-door? And given America's continuing thirst for exorbitantly priced gourmet coffee drinks, there's a lot of cash out there for the taking. As coffee consultant Dan Cox explained, ‘You can't do better than a cup of coffee for profit. It's insanity. A cup of coffee costs 16 cents. Once you add in labor and overhead, you're still charging a 400 percent markup—not bad! Where else can you do that?’ Until Americans decide they need to pay four bucks a pop every morning for a custom-baked, designer-toast experience, probably nowhere.”

An International Monetary Fund veteran explains how the US financial situation is like that of a less-powerful nation's developing economy. Oligarchy, corruption, and the financial sector's control of the government — it's not good.

Is it?

I want to revisit this later; it is an interesting retort to Michael Pollan and others' condemnations of current farming techniques.

"I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline."

"The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music."

I want to read this collection of articles someday, but I doubt I will.