The Last Gasps of the Rent Seeking Class

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research

Everyone’s Mad at Airbnb. This Map Explains What We Should Blame Instead.

The real reason Airbnb clusters where it does - and 1,500 listings you can book guilt-free if the policymakers won't listen.

I Would Like to Own Things Again - Ewan’s Blog

I am getting increasingly tired of being asked to rent everything I use. Not rent in the traditional sense, either. There is at least some honesty in rentin…

Why is everyone so busy?

Time poverty is a problem partly of perception and partly of distribution

Social Influence and Action — Jen Christiansen

I’m wary of climate solutions that are hyper focused on the action of individuals as opposed to systems and corporations. Do you experience carbon footprint guilt every time you board a plane to visit family too? Well, that whole schema was a product of the PR firm Ogilvy & Mather for British Petroleum. It was an effort to shift focus away from oil companies and onto individual responsibility to lower greenhouse gas emissions. For more, read “The carbon footprint sham” by Mark Kaufman for Mashable in 2021, and “Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook” by Rebecca Solnit for The Guardian.    

annotations: Solow sur les rentes et le découplage entre productivité et salaires

Traduction française du billet de blog "Bob Solow on rents and decoupling of productivity and wages" de Branko Milanovic

Craigslist, Wikipedia, and the Abundance Economy

You’ve heard it before. Maybe you’ve even said it. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” “You can’t get something for nothing.” “Somebody has to pay.” People recite these sayings with confidence, as though they were quoting Newton’s Laws of Motion...

Google's TPU Paradox

Why the massive Anthropic deal ($50-80 billion over six years) is a map to a thousand-customer problem.

Chile: fighting fires for free - The World from PRX

How adrenaline junkies ended up staffing Chile's firehouses — for no pay.

What's it like being a nonprofit in Y Combinator? | 80,000 Hours

Now the obligatory Tech Crunch article is out, I'm thrilled to announce we've been in Y Combinator (YC) since June. YC is widely regarded as the world's best startup accelerator, and has supported companies such as AirBnB, Reddit and Dropbox. It provides investment and intensive coaching over three months. I've had a lot of questions about YC over the last couple of days.

Pluralistic: They’re just trying to earn a buck (07 Oct 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Life as a prisoner of the neoliberal mind palace must suck: it's a world where every person who suffers under predatory business practices is a "consumer" who has "revealed a preference" for being screwed:

How to Star-Man | Arguing from Compassion | Center for Inquiry

For example, that universal basic income (UBI) could ameliorate the loss of jobs due to automation, a straw man would be, “So you want people to sit at home all day and collect free money?” Recently, the term has become a cudgel in the culture wars.