Sunday Sermon: The Mad Mullahs of Nihilism

Sometimes, history coalesces down to a vector – a sort of spontaneous push where a bunch of things all come together and civilization seems to be going in the same direction. That’s mostly an effect of my imagination, I fear, because when we look closer at what’s going on (or what has happened in the recent past) it decompiles into a swirl of messy social pushes in all kinds of directions that make no sense at all.

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Sunday Sermon: Making Markets More “Efficient”?

One of the nasty side-effects of a market “maturing” is that the large companies that shape the market will use their installed base as leverage to try to split the market so that they can dominate the split part more thoroughly. It’s a gamble: they hope they can pull customers from the other “side” and lock them in. I’m sure that capitalists have some explanation how this makes a market more efficient, but I suspect they’re talking about making the market more efficient for the vendors, and not better for the customers.

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