Generation Bubble
Economy
Lax Americana: Higher Education and Innovation Stagnation
There’s no way to demonstrate positively that the mind which can move from Moliere to microchips designs better microchips than the mind which concerns itself solely with microchips. This could, at best, be demonstrated over a long period of time, with sustained attention and infinite patience (maybe something along the lines of Michael Apted’s Up series), as a generation liberated from liberal-arts curricula show themselves easily buffaloed by tasks that do not perfectly conform to their limited repertoire of technical aptitudes. But until such time as one can assess that critical appreciation of just this number of Botticellis or that number Bach fugues equals this optimal number on a creativity index, suspicion of disutility will continue plague humanities.
No Preservatives: Whole Foods and the Right-Wing Prescription for Health Care
The genius of a health-savings plan is that it dodges the politically explosive charge of rationing by foisting the rationing on the covered individuals. A $2,500 deductible is a king’s ransom in a country where the saving’s rate is a negative percentage, and in which consumer debt is the economy’s life’s blood. Notice how Mackey refers to employees’ “own health-care dollars” as if they have any such thing. Where do these health-care dollars come from anyway, if not from employees’ pay? What Mackey proposes essentially amounts to a surreptitious clawback of his workers’ wages in the form of premium defrayment.
Confidence Games: Keynes and the Casino Economy
At a certain point, development itself will seem to consist in contriving more and more elaborate means for manipulation and control of others: that economic growth lies in the production of new media forms and techniques, and the use of these purposely to create financial bubbles.
Screw U.: Higher Learning, the Humanities and "Total Quality Management"
“[Adding] fresh value to the subject of his labours,” whether that subject be bedsheets or spreadsheets, certainly makes a diabolical kind of sense; if the object is maximizing profit while minimizing costs, then every nickel squeezed or saved here and there does its humble part in contributing to the bottom line. All that remained to executives was to find hatchet men and women to do the dirty work of putting the screws to the workers. Once they did, “management culture” was born.
Sh*t Floats: Mega-Yacht Sails as the World Economy Fails
That legislative stooges for the HMOs and Big Pharma would like to see political action limited to health coverage comes as no surprise. After all, to do otherwise would wipe out huge profit potential, and thus keep a lot of folks out of the yacht market.
Beggin' for a Piece of That Bubble: Macrorationality and the Limits of the Possible
Macrorationality seems like a matter of circumscribing one’s possible decisions at the broadest possible point, of eliminating individual autonomy in favor of better economic predictability at the social scale. All this while maintaining the pretense that reality is merely being measured more carefully, not being shaped, called into being, by the measuring tools.
Reading Degree Zero: Printed Matter's "IF"-fy Prognosis
Yet the object is precisely what the “engrossed reader” so deeply esteems (one is tempted to say, fetishizes). To this kind of reader, universal access to books means nothing if one cannot hold them or turn their pages. Moyer does not say it, but one need not read between the lines too strenuously to tease out a critical implication: the “engrossed-reader” position — the position that gives primacy to having over sharing books — is clearly reactionary, because it assigns more value to the material object’s preservation than to the de-materialized text’s dissemination.
Liquid Gold: Piss's Potential to Power the Hydrogen Economy Is No Accident
Yes, it seems urine, which for millennia humans have been wantonly voiding down toilets, against walls of bars, and even on each other, may just be a fluid more precious than petrol. Urea, urine’s signature chemical, holds the key to the magic.
Captain "I Owe": James Howard Kunstler on Michael Jackson and the Recession
Though generally reluctant to pile on the conspicuously deceased, we at Generation Bubble couldn’t allow some recent remarks by notorious peak-oiler and secular apocalyptician James Howard Kunstler escape our readers’ notice. On his blog, the colorfully titled Clusterf*ck Nation, he observes Michael Jackson’s passing. But Kunstler, playing Antony to Jackson’s Caesar, wishes to bury the [...]
The Divergence of the Twain: Fifty Years of C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures"
The blog ideonexus recently presented some musings on C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture, “The Two Cultures.” Snow, who wore two professional hats (scientist and novelist), argued that both the matter and methodology of science and the humanities stood irreconcilably opposed; because science, which places supreme important on the scientific method and the reproducibility of [...]
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