Stephen's god died on the longest day of the year…
Three years later, Stephen is …
Viewing this book on Goodreads I saw a list for well written comfort books where people are nice to each other, and I gotta say, this book is exactly that. So I made a list on here with books I read/I'm reading soon. It's an open group, so please feel free to contribute with your faves from Science Fiction & Fantasy. Basically, the closest it makes you feel to a book from Becky Chambers, the best it'll fit in this list.
Alle reden von Missständen und Krisen: Hier die Klima- und Rohstoffkrise, dort die sozial-politische Dauerkrise Griechenlands oder die menschenverachtende Ausbeutung …
I've seen this book paired with "Unmasking Autism" which feels like a slightly odd choice. While that book felt like more of an actionable book, this feels more educational for people who don't know much about autism. I think it fills that role better than Silberman's book, which always seems to be held up as the 'first book you should read', partly because it's written 'from the inside', as it were, and partly because it doesn't suffer from that book's unfortunate perspective on Asperger. Still pretty useful, especially in its coverage of support needs and feeling comfortable requiring accommodations.
Conversations about climate change are filled with challenges involving complex data, deeply held values, and political issues. Understanding Climate Change …
Conversations about climate change are filled with challenges involving complex data, deeply held values, and political issues. Understanding Climate Change …
In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. …
In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and …
Essential*, but enraging
5 stars
Asterisk because, although rentier capitalism is everywhere, the author (successfully, in my view) argues that it's been taken much further in the UK than anywhere else, and so it's particularly essential, and enraging, for anyone with a link to the UK.
Christophers lays out the essentials of rent and rentiers, and then devotes a chapter to each of the main instances in the UK economy. This includes land rents, though relatively briefly, but more importantly all the monopoly and near-monopoly businesses to which we're exposed, both the natural monopolies resulting from Thatcher-era privatisations, and the owners of other forms of monopoly, such as IP rights or the digital giants.
Perhaps the most enraging lesson to take away from the book is not just that, basically, the UK has been wrecked by neoliberalism, but that the 'promise' of neoliberalism to be all about unleashing innovation and competition actually only applies to …
Asterisk because, although rentier capitalism is everywhere, the author (successfully, in my view) argues that it's been taken much further in the UK than anywhere else, and so it's particularly essential, and enraging, for anyone with a link to the UK.
Christophers lays out the essentials of rent and rentiers, and then devotes a chapter to each of the main instances in the UK economy. This includes land rents, though relatively briefly, but more importantly all the monopoly and near-monopoly businesses to which we're exposed, both the natural monopolies resulting from Thatcher-era privatisations, and the owners of other forms of monopoly, such as IP rights or the digital giants.
Perhaps the most enraging lesson to take away from the book is not just that, basically, the UK has been wrecked by neoliberalism, but that the 'promise' of neoliberalism to be all about unleashing innovation and competition actually only applies to workers. That is, while workers are forced to become more competitive through increased precarity, big companies have become less and less innovative because they can make money simply through 'sweating' their assets.
About the only downside to the book is that I now feel I really ought to get around to reading Piketty and that... feels like a lot.
In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and …
If capitalist rentierism is successfully subdued, what remains cannot be capitalism as we know it. This is because, as Piketty has argued, rentierism is effectively hardwired into capitalism. Capital, he writes, is ‘risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least at its inception, yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulates in large enough amounts – that is its vocation, its logical destination’. What we call ‘capitalism’ is, or inevitably becomes, rentierism.
