• Posts Tagged ‘economics’

    Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger

    by  • January 31, 2012 • BOOKS & AUTHORS • 0 Comments

    The first 120 or so pages of Shutting Out the Sun (2006) are fascinating, and indeed, Zielenziger’s portrayal of a number of Japanese hikikomori (shut-ins), their families, and those working the help bring them back out into the public world, manages to be very thoughtful and compassionate, and even, at times, moving. Later chapters are...

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    Movetoamend

    by  • December 9, 2011 • PERSONAL • 2 Comments

    I’ve been thinking a lot of these things since the early 90s: I’m obviously not the only one. This is salutary. I think there needs to be more than just this. I think we need to rein in corporations to the point where they’re in service to...

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    There You Go Again, Reality

    by  • June 5, 2010 • SF, WRITING • 0 Comments

    In the story I’m now working on (working title Capped), some software glitches (actually, algorithms in weak-AI software used on the stock exchange) causes a massive, worldwide economic crash (and especially one specific part of the world economic system) in the space of a few minutes. Ooops, then it happened in real life. Well,...

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    Clean Reinstalls? What?

    by  • February 2, 2009 • PERSONAL • 4 Comments

    Today I went to the Woori Bank to get my 공인 인중서, which is, basically, a little electronic certificate that I need to have in order to file my taxes. (Which I can only do on paper now: the electronic tax filing through my workplace closed a week ago, and the office assistants either...

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    Minerva, Censorship, Schlerosis, and IPs

    by  • February 1, 2009 • KOREA • 2 Comments

    Events in Korea these days remind me a fair bit of that Demosthenes/Locke subplot in Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game. If you haven’t read the novel, well, basically a couple of really smart kids hijack the world political debate by posting pseudonymously online, using personae that are, in fact, quite different from their...

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    Various Bitlets

    by  • January 4, 2009 • PERSONAL • 6 Comments

    I’m subscribed to a couple of hundred feeds over at Newsgator, but I have been seriously, seriously behind on nearly all of them — including the feeds of some close friends. I was just overwhelmed over the past year or so, and fell behind on everything. Anyway, in the past few days I chopped...

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    Válka s Mloky

    by  • December 24, 2008 • SF • 0 Comments

    “Nowadays we simply cannot wait a few hundred years for something good or bad to happen in the world. Take the migration of peoples which used to drag on over several centuries: today, with our present organization of transport, it could be accomplished in three years; otherwise there would be in profit in it....

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