Entrepreneurs of the self are the future:

“It’s easier to grow on Instagram than it is to get a raise at a job,” says Angie, a 17-year-old from Montana who says she has made $1,500 since she started posting sponsored content in June. “You manage yourself.”

I agree with the person who suggested the Bible. It would make my job much easier, that’s why.

I haven’t read any of the others except for Zinn’s People’s History, and that was crap on a stick.

Every day more and more people are clocking on to the nature of liquid capital:

It is a fairly easy thing for an established American business to move its corporate domicile to some other country. . . It is also a fairly easy thing for a new business being founded by Americans to incorporate in some other country from the beginning. There is no insurmountable reason for, say, Microsoft or Altria (formerly Philip Morris) to be domiciled in the United States. Silicon Valley’s competitive edge comes from people, and people are mobile.

This is why the fantasies about taxing big business or the hyper-fluid elites to fund welfare programs are dishonest at worst and quaintly antiquated at best. The solid stage of capitalism that allowed for this kind of thing is over. You can’t treat the capital of the 2020s like you did the capital of the 1940s.

Instead of the inane and childish fantasizing of the “tax and fund” nature, we urgently need to discuss the transformation in the global capitalism and look for ways that welfare can exist in this new economic reality.

This is why I ended up supporting Hillary over Bernie. She pretended that fluid capitalism is all cute and cuddly, which stank. But he pretended it didn’t exist at all, which stank worse. You can’t fight something that you don’t think exists.

We have one of those outfits opening in our town where you go to draw and booze. Or paint and booze. It’s very annoying because we already have a place where you go do pottery and booze. Who needs all of this crap? What we really need is more places you could do indoor activities with kids. And outdoor activities with kids. There are 365 days in a year. And each of those days you got to come up with something to do with kids.

Places like stupid Toys R Us could avoid bankruptcy if they hid two thirds of the inventory and opened up a play space with organized activities for kids. Made themselves a destination for parents who are desperate for activities.

And the same goes for bookstores that whine about Amazon stealing market share. We are at the local bookstore at least once a week because they have a huge play space filled with toys to hug and buttons to press. And while we are there, we get hungry, thirsty, and eager for nourishment for our toddler-overwhelmed brains. It’s brilliant.

Yes, I was silent all day because I noticed the darn paint and booze place in the morning and stewed about it all day. It’s the first week of classes, and it never looks pretty.

I watched A Very English Scandal with High Grant and I highly recommend. There’s nothing particularly English about the events it portrays, as we are seeing with the raging scandal in the Catholic Church but Hugh Grant is great in the mini-series. Now that he’s no longer pretty – and boy, has he aged! – he gets to play serious roles where he can display his acting talent.

Finally, somebody on the Left is waking up and saying something smart:

The nation is the only “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson put, where everything from mass transit to health care to wealth distribution to a green economy can find traction.

The NYTimes doesn’t let me link to its pieces because that’s how the stupid app works. If you want the whole article, Google-search the quote.

After sifting through mountains of inane leftist chatter about inclusions, diversities z safe passages, and UBIs, I finally find somebody who has something of value to say. This is very heartening.

In recent decades, progressive forces in the United States have split between two positions, both of which surrender a robust and hopeful sense of national citizenship. On one track can be found a cosmopolitan economic elite that embrace a multicultural world order shaped largely by the politics of corporate globalization. On the other track are radical critics of the racism and imperialism of the American state who often support local community and transnational solidarity but maintain a deep cynicism, even despair, about the American project. Both groups have abdicated the national story to their shared political enemies.

Exactly! And that’s why the Left can win any battle except the ones that concern the economics. This is why it’s been defeated, time and again, on everything that has to do with money. This is a movement that can bring us gay marriage (and yay for that, it’s an enormous and wonderful achievement that makes me happy every time I think about it) but can’t bring even the tiniest victory over the neoliberal economic forces.

If all you do is dismantle obstacles in the way of liquid capital, of course the capital will win.

If you ever wondered why the Left is do good at winning ideological battles but is so impotent on the economy, here’s your answer.

This is how desperate companies are to retain workers:

A Minneapolis marketing company recently made tweaks to its employee benefits this summer, ranging from conventional to unusual. It gave workers a larger commuter stipend, as well as a reason to avoid the office altogether: “fur-ternity leave,” or the ability to work from home for a week to welcome new dogs or cats.

Of course, it’s a certain kind of workers. This is a creative industry where personal idiosyncrasies are in high demand.