Today’s lesson is diminishing marginal futility ✎ By Wayne K. Spear I’m going to stop 80% of what I’m doing, right now. We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule, known as the law of unequal distribution. – Eighty percent of… Read More ›
Economics
The Bangladesh Factory Fires Could, and Must, Be Prevented
IT WAS ONLY eight days after the March 25, 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and Rose Schneiderman was in no mood for playing nice. Addressing her (mostly) middle-class audience of Women’s Trade Union League supporters, she said: I would be… Read More ›
Canada’s Little War Against Contraband Tobacco
If you were a collector of jurisdictional nightmare, then your holy grail possession would surely be the small Kanien’keha:ka — or Mohawk, as it’s called in English — community of Akwesasne. Transected by two provincial, one state and two federal… Read More ›
Why We Learn Nothing from the Presidential Debates
I‘VE TAKEN IN all the US presidential and vice-presidential debates. Over the years these have become highly rehearsed and scripted affairs, meticulously polished and doubtless focus group vetted and — well, who knows what else the candidates do these days…. Read More ›
Class Warfare Comes Home
OF THE MANY, tedious American delusions, perhaps the most insistent and counter-factual materialist superstition is the daft creed that America is a classless society. How useful then for so many citizens to chuck this nonsense and have at it in… Read More ›
(Big) Business As Usual
[Originally published in ASH Magaine, Volume Four Number Three, Summer 1997.] Now and then I find myself in a philosophical mood, pondering the evolution of this creature called ASH. I think it’s a healthy activity, the more so since I’m… Read More ›
In Bill Gates’s World (1998)
I am not sure exactly how much money Bill Gates is ‘worth’ as I write this sentence. His net worth is, I think, around $50 billion. In any case the number will have dropped or gone up a few hundred… Read More ›
Capitalism: For and Against
You’ve heard often and perhaps recently that socialism is defeated and that capitalism is therefore triumphant, as if economic history were a basketball match. Yet socialism, by which one today generally means Soviet Communism, fell for internal reasons. The anti-Communists… Read More ›
The Secret Life of Work
Here are some general observations of the work that goes on in a modern city. To begin, everyone is in a hurry. Most people I’m guessing are engaged in some sort of bureaucratic enterprise, and the rest are downtown to… Read More ›
Downsizing and The Dollar Store
The dollar store is a good example of that creature commonly termed a phenomenon, something of apparent and great import which cries out for explanation. In every city they are popping-up almost like roadside weeds, taking advantage of meagre soil…. Read More ›
