Our (Mis)Leading Indicators. On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up?
That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully… On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.
There’s every reason to believe he was right. The Spirit Level authors: why society is more unequal than ever. A lot has happened in the five years since we published our book, The Spirit Level.
New Labour were still perhaps too relaxed about people becoming "filthy rich". And there was an assumption that inequality mattered only if it increased poverty, and that for most people "real" poverty was a thing of the past. But so much has changed. In the aftermath of the financial crash and the emergence of Occupy, there has been a resurgence of interest in inequality. Around 80% of Britons now think the income gap is too large, and the message has been taken up by world leaders. According to Barack Obama, income inequality is the "defining challenge of our times", while Pope Francis states that "inequality is the roots of social ills".
35 Countries Where the U.S. Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords and Terrorists. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com March 4, 2014 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The U.S. is backing Ukraine's extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Behind a firewall of impunity and protection from the State Department and the CIA, U.S. clients and puppets have engaged in the worst crimes known to man, from murder and torture to coups and genocide. Human Emergence Middle East. By Alan Tonkin Introduction In looking at the world with its widely varying values systems it is interesting to see how the word "democracy" means different things to different people.
An example of this is when leaders from the Western developed world speak of democracy they generally mean constitutional democracy based on a universal franchise, multi-party system. These countries generally operate in the Blue/Orange/Green/Yellow spectrum of values systems. However, in developing economies constitutional arrangements can vary with the values spread being across the Purple/Red/Blue/Orange/Green range. How Democratic Systems Vary Across Values Systems. Slaveriet tilbage i Danmark.
This Is What Every Young Girl Can Expect to be Bombarded with for a Lifetime, Condensed Into 1 Min. Socialize Social Media! On Wednesday, November 6, Twitter, the so-called microblogging service, went public, in the private sense.
Shares initially offered at $26 were by the end of the day trading near $45, giving a company with 2300 employees a market value of more than $31 billion, and meaning that each of the service’s 230 million users—who are also, in a real sense, its producers—could be considered to be contributing $135 to the company’s value. That value is almost certain to fall, since Twitter shares appear ludicrously overpriced. As John Cassidy of the New Yorker calculated, “Investors were paying forty-nine dollars per dollar of revenues, and five hundred and forty-one dollars per dollar of cash flow . . . Apple, the most valuable technology company in the world, trades at less than three times its revenue and eight times its cash flow.” 1. 2. 3.
Materialism: a system that eats us from the inside out. That they are crass, brash and trashy goes without saying.
But there is something in the pictures posted on Rich Kids of Instagram (and highlighted by the Guardian last week) that inspires more than the usual revulsion towards crude displays of opulence. There is a shadow in these photos – photos of a young man wearing all four of his Rolex watches, a youth posing in front of his helicopter, endless pictures of cars, yachts, shoes, mansions, swimming pools and spoilt white boys throwing gangster poses in private jets – of something worse: something that, after you have seen a few dozen, becomes disorienting, even distressing. The pictures are, of course, intended to incite envy. They reek instead of desperation. The young men and women seem lost in their designer clothes, dwarfed and dehumanised by their possessions, as if ownership has gone into reverse.
Danmarkshistoriens største sociale bedrageri. Arno Kruse.
The High Price of Materialism. Neuromarketing - 14. okt. 2013. Why don't Economists understand money? (Conference 2013) NSA files decoded: Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations explained. Two factors opened the way for the rapid expansion of surveillance over the past decade: the fear of terrorism created by the 9/11 attacks and the digital revolution that led to an explosion in cell phone and internet use.
But along with these technologies came an extension in the NSA’s reach few in the early 1990s could have imagined. Details that in the past might have remained private were suddenly there for the taking.