My publisher @TorBooks and @Goodreads are drawing for a giveaway of advance copies of my next novel, "Red Team Blues," a Silicon Valley forensic accounting thriller about a cryptocurrency heist - If you're in the US or Canada, enter here to win a copy:
#5yrsago Russian Orthodox Patriarch announces church-government inquiry to prove that the Tsar was killed in 1917 as part of a Jewish ritual johnhelmer.net/torquemada-mak… 8/
#5yrsago Investigation into emergency rooms shows that for-profit hospitals engage in billions in price-gouging vox.com/health-care/20… 9/
#5yrsago The father of the most hostile piece of street furniture in world history explains why he thinks he’s right to make life harder for homeless people and socializing kids cnn.com/style/article/… 11/
#5yrsago A free sf anthology about space travel, inequality, equity and public policy: Kim Stanley Robinson, Madeline Ashby, Eileen Gunn, Ramez Naam, Steven Barnes, Karl Schroeder and more! csi.asu.edu/books/vvev/ 13/
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, @beaconPressBks et al) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
If you're a @Medium subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
My latest Medium column is "Yes, It’s Censorship: Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal."
Running a business is risky: you can't be sure how many customers you'll have, or what they'll ask for. Guess wrong and you'll either have too few workers for the crowd, or you'll pay workers to stand around. This is true even when your "business" is a "hospital."
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Capitalists hate capitalism. Capitalism is defined by risk - the risk of competitors poaching your customers and workers. Capitalists secretly dream of a "command economy" where others must arrange their affairs to suit the capitalists' preferences, taking on their risk.
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Postmortems and blame for the 2024 elections are thick on the ground, but amidst all those theories and pointed fingers, one explanation looms large and credible: the American housing emergency. If the system can't put a roof over your head, that system needs to go.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
American housing has been in crisis for decades, of course, but it keeps getting worse...and worse...and *worse*. Americans pay more for worse housing than at any time in their history.
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After 9/11, we were told that "no cost was too high" when it came to fighting terrorism, and indeed, the US did blow *trillions* on forever wars and regime change projects and black sites and kidnappings and dronings and gulags that were supposed to end terrorism.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Back in the imperial core, we all got to play the home edition of the "no price is too high" War on Terror game. New, extremely invasive airport security measures were instituted.
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The Canadian national identity involves a lot of sneering at the US, but when it comes to oligarchy, Canada makes America look positively amateurish.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The Biden administration disappointed, frustrated and enraged in so many ways, including abetting a genocide - but one consistent bright spot over the past four years was the unseen-for-generations frontal assault on corporate power and corporate corruption.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The three words that define this battle above all others are "unfair and deceptive" - words that appear in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and other legislation modeled on it, like USC40 Section 41712(a).
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The core of the prepper fantasy: "What if the world ended in the *precise* way that made *me* the most important person?"
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their "leadership skills."
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