In addition just being naturally socially averse, one of the reasons I do not have a profile on LinkedIn or similar sites is because IT recruiters are like sharks.

In a time where so many people have such difficulty finding a job, I know I will sound like a bit of an ass, but if you have in-demand IT skills you get too many job openings and to go along with them voracious recruiters hounding you about them constantly.

For instance, I have no LinkedIn profile. No social media presence at all. I am very hard to find on the internet, really, for a variety of reasons. And yet I still get IT recruiters pitching jobs to me nearly every week.

I have no idea how they get my CV. No interest in the jobs (who the fuck wants to live in Hoboken, NJ?) and a lot of the time the emails are downright rude and demanding.

It’s a good thing — I won’t deny that! – that finding a job in the fields I know best is easy. It’s nice to be wanted. But the recruiters make it somehow akin to being stalked and that is never a good feeling.

Of course Fed policies favor the rich. Doing anything else in the US is politically impossible.

Right now, stimulative policies that didn’t favor the rich would nearly all involve direct or near-direct cash transfers to Romney’s hated 47%. Can’t have the parasites getting something undeserved, now can we?

Never mind that for the past 30+ years all the productivity gains in the economy have accrued to the top one percent.

And never mind how much the rich and their companies are subsidized by tax breaks that the less-wealthy do not receive, are coddled by the press and by the law, are able to send their children to better schools and to live in better neighborhoods. And how most of the rich got there by starting on third base, usually followed soon thereafter by their theft of it from everyone else.

In most cases, there were no bootstraps and no pulling themselves up thereby. Like the Welfare Queen, that is all a myth.

Later, I will write a post about how thinking of the economy in terms of money is a distraction, and very much the wrong frame for discussing these topics. It leads to conceptual opacity rather than illumination and conceals how the economy is evolving and camouflages how it will further change in the near future.

It is really mystifying to me how people who were born with so many advantages, and who have gained so many more in life — like Romney — can genuinely feel so persecuted and set upon. I know that I would not feel this way were I to become very rich, and would gladly pay taxes.

Perhaps it’s just that I am not a complete sociopath.

I often hear Apple criticized for being overpriced. And I guess they are overpriced if you don’t care a whit about quality.

Is it worth devoting the first 750 or so words of this piece to the iPhone 5’s surface appeal? I don’t know how else to convey the niceness of this thing. This iPhone 5 review unit is the single nicest object in my possession. I own things that cost and remain worth more (e.g. my car). But I own nothing this nice. It sounds hyperbolic to put it that way, but I offer this observation with no exaggeration.

When you pick up an Apple product, you can feel the workmanship and thought that went into calling forth each object from the void. Apple’s products are the only ones I use regularly that I would call “art.”

I use a 30”  Cinema Display mainly because the screen is great (though nothing compared to the new iPad screen). But I also use it because the object itself is beautiful. It will be beautiful in a thousand years, just as Roman friezes are. It is timeless and there is a reason many movies feature a Cinema Display in their “futuristic” scenes – and not because it looks futuristic, per se.

No, it’s because it will never look antiquated. Know how 1960s sci-fi looks so dated, like it might as well have been filmed in the 1400s? That’s what set designers are trying to avoid when there is a Cinema Display mise en scène.

If you care more about price – and can afford it – an Apple product is what you’d nearly always choose, in my opinion.

I sound like an Apple ad, I know. But it’s worth recognizing one of the few companies in the world that cares about quality of experience and design first and foremost. It is extremely rare and worth noting.

• The first laptop didn’t catch on due to sexism.
• Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?
• The “no self-defeating object” argument.
• One year later, what ever happened to Occupy Wall Street?
• Is Unemployment Actually Helping the Democrats?
• “Traditional” Morality and Anti-Porn Arguments That Fail.
• Prephonological spelling.

I’m used to my privilege of being a straight white male, but I am not often consciously aware of it because it is the water in which I swim.

Being used to this privilege and nearly always receiving the benefit of the doubt as a result of it, it is really strange when I’ve ventured into completely mom-dominated environments where men are either completely invisible or treated in an extremely hostile manner.

Ignore the evo-psych explanation later on in the linked post, though.

There are places and situations that moms claim as their domain and men are not welcome unless they’re with a mom and relegated to holding packages or minding the kids while the mom takes care of the important business.  Anywhere or in any situation where mothers run the show—playgrounds, supermarkets, shoe stores, doctors’ waiting rooms, the spaces outside schools where parents wait to pick up their kids—men without women, even dads with kids in tow, are greeted with cold indifference if not outright hostility.

It’s really illuminating when this happens because it allows me to understand how many people must experience the world nearly all of the time. And it is not pleasant.

The 401(k) is simply another method purpose-built so that Wall Street can skim more wealth from workers – and it has worked spectacularly for this purpose while leaving workers much less well off.

The typical worker age 55 to 64 had just $54,000 in a 401(k) in 2010, according to a new report by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, and households with workers in that age group had $120,000 in retirement savings on average, if the money rolled into I.R.A.’s was included. That $120,000 is less than one-fourth the savings recommended by many retirement experts. Moreover, the center calculated, that $120,000 would provide an annuity of a paltry $7,000 a year.

Most Americans younger than 40 will never be able to retire. Most will work till they drop. This is the society we’ve created, and a result of the choices we’ve made. There’s probably no way back now, either.