Nice article. I read Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities a few years back and was immediately struck by the same habits of mind you describe in this piece. Jacobs was very strong on the advantages of certain kinds of urban living, and she understood how cities are great producers & aggregators of ideas and wealth. But when… Read more

Thanks Robert Moses for the current Penn Station. The distended anus of New York. Read more

“But when you do, you’re encouraging those who ultimately want to see such private actions replace the democratic norms upon which our society was built.” Read more

To continue my thought, I need to clarify that I loathe the brokenness discussed​ here, but for the people who are in need of crowd-sourced emergency funds: I don’t have any negative feelings towards them or their choice to use the options they have. The situation they’re put in in of having to sell their need, their… Read more

This totally nails my greatest qualm about Go Fund Me type stuff - the pity problem. There’s something about building a social charitable impulse based around people having to publically beg that is feeding the us/them of class privilege and income inequality. Read more

The main example of crowdfunding I can’t stand are the charitable telethons of Comic Relief and Children in Need here in the UK. Not only are they an example of the rich expecting the poor to cough up, with rich celebs donating “time” rather than any actual amounts of money despite usually being tax dodging… Read more

I don’t have a problem with a foundation growing its money by investments so that it will continue to have money for charity for decades to come. Read more

Stick to blogging. Read more

You want the value to go up. Not the price it costs you.
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This was very illuminating. Thank you Read more

This ‘live forever’ status due to tax exemption is what scares me most about the Church of Scientology. Those assholes are absolutely horrible yet they’ve amassed enough assets to basically carry on and grow forever. Read more

I didn’t even realize there we still privately owned banks. Read more

If you worry about a company as large as Uber being privately held, rather than listed on a public stock exchange, then this is also good news. Read more

The relationship between the European and the African in the New World (especially in the US) has always been one of economics. The race riots of 1919 shows this clearly with the white worker attempting to oust the black worker from the labour markets of the industrial North and it finally culminated in the… Read more

The sad thing is nothing is probably going to change. because for one while they say they want to grow talent, they will continue to pass us up for other talent just off the color of our skin. And the Black owned banks that are left sadly will either dwindle or fail because they are way too localized and specific to… Read more