"A sense of superiority, left over from apartheid, fuels this misplaced sense of being democracy’s victim. If you conceived of the possibility you might not be the best, other responses to failure beyond shock will open up. Apartheid’s beneficiaries aren’t yet in that head-space." IOL
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"These days you often hear people say things like "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product." There is something to this, but the Tirole-Rochet paper shows that this same dynamic exists in a variety of industries. Any time the market is two-sided you are both the customer and the product simultaneously. That's true whether the platform owner is charging you or not." Vox
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"A decade ago, Leith Residents Association was organising against the women who worked in the tolerance zone by forming vigilante gangs and going out and threatening the women with baseball bats. The tolerance zone was closed due to this local campaign, leading to a huge spike in violence against street-based sex workers perpetrated by men posing as clients." Glasgow Sex Worker
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"The truck driver shows his passport then the officers ask for the passengers’ passports. The driver replies, reaches for his wallet and takes out R100. The officer refuses.”These people paid you more than this”, he says. He is offered R200 and lets us through." Groundup
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Journalism is so weird: he "risks a row". Why not just say "Here's David Cameon with a bunch of people in blackface. They're dicks; he's a dick."? Guardian
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Little slice of life piece about the market for prefab shacks in Cape Town. M&G
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These actually are rather good ideas. Cracked
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[TW: sexual assault]
"If we didn’t put ourselves in dangerous situations, we never go anywhere. Ever. Because we don’t know who’s a threat. We can’t tell. It could be the old dude in the bank or the suit on the bus. It could be the hobo with a shank or the coworker after hours or the men who ambushed me on my own block. Can’t be sure. Never totally sure." Medium
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The overall message of this is pretty obvious - it's not the progressivity of the tax system so much as the entire fiscal apparatus (i.e. including expenditures) that should be relevant to the left wing. Vox
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This is kind of terrifying. For the record, I have nothing against private property developers, in principle. They certainly *could* play a role in increasing and improving the housing supply. But we've now reached a point where new construction is sufficiently constrained - by zoning restrictions and anti-development bias, by the demise of new social housing, by speculative incentives to leave land undeveloped, - that there is essentially a fixed amount available, and councils have enormous incentives simply to transfer it from the poor to the rich. Guardian
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Raging, despairing criticism of the JSC and of South African institutions generally.
"What does a woman have to do in this country to be treated as a human being and humanely?" Times Live
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A nice little video concisely stating the evidence for evolution, focussing on the whales and dolphins. Youtube
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An inheritance tax actually seems like a terrible idea compared to an annual wealth tax. A tax applied only once a generation, and a high rate, offers both strong incentives and relatively easy options for evasion. I also don't see why someone who dies with all their wealth intact ought to be taxed more heavily than someone who gives it away to their relatives piecemeal over the course of their life. The latter is arguably a greater contributor to inequality anyway, since the children of rich people tend to become rich well before their parents die. Jacobin
>>><<<
"These days you often hear people say things like "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product." There is something to this, but the Tirole-Rochet paper shows that this same dynamic exists in a variety of industries. Any time the market is two-sided you are both the customer and the product simultaneously. That's true whether the platform owner is charging you or not." Vox
>>><<<
"A decade ago, Leith Residents Association was organising against the women who worked in the tolerance zone by forming vigilante gangs and going out and threatening the women with baseball bats. The tolerance zone was closed due to this local campaign, leading to a huge spike in violence against street-based sex workers perpetrated by men posing as clients." Glasgow Sex Worker
>>><<<
"The truck driver shows his passport then the officers ask for the passengers’ passports. The driver replies, reaches for his wallet and takes out R100. The officer refuses.”These people paid you more than this”, he says. He is offered R200 and lets us through." Groundup
>>><<<
Journalism is so weird: he "risks a row". Why not just say "Here's David Cameon with a bunch of people in blackface. They're dicks; he's a dick."? Guardian
>>><<<
Little slice of life piece about the market for prefab shacks in Cape Town. M&G
>>><<<
These actually are rather good ideas. Cracked
>>><<<
[TW: sexual assault]
"If we didn’t put ourselves in dangerous situations, we never go anywhere. Ever. Because we don’t know who’s a threat. We can’t tell. It could be the old dude in the bank or the suit on the bus. It could be the hobo with a shank or the coworker after hours or the men who ambushed me on my own block. Can’t be sure. Never totally sure." Medium
>>><<<
The overall message of this is pretty obvious - it's not the progressivity of the tax system so much as the entire fiscal apparatus (i.e. including expenditures) that should be relevant to the left wing. Vox
>>><<<
This is kind of terrifying. For the record, I have nothing against private property developers, in principle. They certainly *could* play a role in increasing and improving the housing supply. But we've now reached a point where new construction is sufficiently constrained - by zoning restrictions and anti-development bias, by the demise of new social housing, by speculative incentives to leave land undeveloped, - that there is essentially a fixed amount available, and councils have enormous incentives simply to transfer it from the poor to the rich. Guardian
>>><<<
Raging, despairing criticism of the JSC and of South African institutions generally.
"What does a woman have to do in this country to be treated as a human being and humanely?" Times Live
>>><<<
A nice little video concisely stating the evidence for evolution, focussing on the whales and dolphins. Youtube
>>><<<
An inheritance tax actually seems like a terrible idea compared to an annual wealth tax. A tax applied only once a generation, and a high rate, offers both strong incentives and relatively easy options for evasion. I also don't see why someone who dies with all their wealth intact ought to be taxed more heavily than someone who gives it away to their relatives piecemeal over the course of their life. The latter is arguably a greater contributor to inequality anyway, since the children of rich people tend to become rich well before their parents die. Jacobin
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