no third solution » Literature
A Profitable Company With a Liquidity Problem
Detroit’s Greektown Casino is in bankruptcy proceedings! (permalink PDF) Huh? Of course, the Casino management argues that they’re not really bankrupt, they just can’t pay the bills. I wonder if I could get away with that argument? Casinos have license from the State, which grants them (for all intents and purposes) a monopoly on gaming. Hell, if you have a big enough Casino, you even get to exempt yourself from smoking bans! After all, they wouldn’t want to give back any of Casino Windsor’s customers! Detroit’s Casinos have (essentially) no competitors. Their business model, like that of any other Casino or gaming establishment, consists almost entirely of “games of chance” on which, over any appreciable length of time, they are guaranteed to profit, and … Read entire article »
Filed under: Literature
The Rebellion of the Dead
On page 30 of crimethINC.’s latest book, Days of War, Nights of Love: There is no more commonplace observation than this, but to my knowledge no one has yet set out to study why children and adults experience the passing of time differently. I’ve thought about that problem before, and the answer to me seems straightforward. As a young child, a single summer vacation represents mathematically a significant portion of your life; a year, even moreso. As we accumulate experience in life, each interval is a lesser part of the whole experience, thus far. To a five year old, who might have 2 or 3 years or real memory, a single summer is immense. To a twenty-eight year old, with twenty-five or twenty-six years of memory, a single … Read entire article »
Filed under: Anarchy!, Blog Reactions, Literature, ponderings
Buy This Book
Normally, I won’t recommend a book until I’ve read it from cover to cover. That said, I bought a used copy of The Voluntary City about a week ago. I’ve read maybe the first four chapters, which are essay-esque, in that I understand they weren’t necessarily written as part of a larger work. It is a compilation, but a skillfully crafted compilation, which explodes (so far) the common conceptions about government’s role in urban planning and community development. Absolutely fascinating – which, if you know me, is how I describe eye-opening books. None of what these chapters has described has been outside the realm of my theoretical understanding of voluntarism, but it’s wonderful to find detailed, empirical evidence that your “crackpot theories” actually work. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Anarchy!, Government is Slavery, Literature