I never thought I’d live in a world where people gleefully subject themselves to surveillance and control technologies like Facebook and this garbage.

Sure, I will put Alexa in my home — a device that literally listens to all my conversations and sends them to who knows where.

That sounds like a great idea. Sign me up. Really avoids inconveniencing the NSA, FBI, etc. Instead of bothering to bug my domicile, I pay all the costs. It’s laissez-faire snooping. Ah, the glories of market-based solutions.

If you’d told me Trump would be president when I was a kid — ok, sounds weird, but maybe.

If you’d told me that people would willingly subject themselves to Facebook’s program of surveillance and manipulation, and would voluntarily pay to place bugging devices in their homes and would also carry tracking devices in their pockets at all times — I would’ve thought you to be absolutely raving mad and would’ve laughed at you.

But here we are.

I helped close a $1.2 million sale at work in the past few days. Doing technical sales isn’t really something I want to pursue as a vocation, but turns out I am pretty decent at it.

Those sales pay my salary, so interesting to see it and do it from the front lines.

We’ve been having a problem lately at work with very expensive hardware arriving non-functional. This hardware runs $50,000 or $60,000 each — not cheap. It’s not clear if it’s the shipping company or the hardware reseller causing the problems — or perhaps both.

Lately, the reseller has been giving the hardware the “white glove” treatment (they claim) as they handle it.

Even with this, another $60,000 box arrived in a non-working state today.

On an internal call discussing it, someone said that damage occurred even with the vendor’s white glove treatment.

And I said, “Yeah, but it was a boxing glove.”

No one laughed! And it was funny! It was a good quip!

So now I recount it here so at least someone can laugh, somewhere.

I’m curious why Marketwatch used Stan Lee for the illustration of this story.

Wonder if they even knew it was Stan Lee? Because that’s definitely not an economist — no, it’s someone with actual talents and skills to contribute to the world.

I’m not so exorcised over the supposed end of democracy in this country caused by Trumpism because democracy had already ended a long while ago de facto.

Most objections to Trump stem from that he’s louche and uncouth and visibly unprincipled rather than any specific actions.

If this were not the case, pseudo-liberals would have been just as strenuously and vociferously objecting to many Obama actions that merited in their view nary a response.

We already lived in a neo-fascist pretend democracy. Trump just put an orange pouty face on it.

I know it’s not on offer, but if it were, I’d gladly cut my pay in half for universal health care, a $20 minimum wage, real unions having a say again, and UBI.

I know, I know: fairies and unicorns and princesses.

But the thing is, the 40-hour-work week, a minimum wage and Social Security all were at one time also fairies and unicorns and princesses.

Don’t believe that, read some goddamn history for once.

This reminds me of a bad experience I had with a pharmacist.

I was there filling a prescription for someone else. From the moment I showed up to get a prescription filled, the pharmacist was an arrogant dismissive prick. That I could let slide. It’s just how many people are.

But when I handed him my ID, that’s when things went south. He said, “This is a military ID. And you’re not in the military. I should confiscate this from you. In fact I think I just won’t give it back.” I was in the military, actually, but had just returned from a deployment where my hair was longer and I looked more unkempt than usual. How he thought pharmacists had the authority to confiscate anything from anyone remains a complete mystery to me.

He wasn’t joking, though. As I mentioned above: arrogant dismissive prick.

I said calmly, almost cheerily, “You’d be surprised how fast I can jump this counter and make you regret that course of action.”

He waited a moment to see if I would flinch or walk my statement back. I just stared at him. The moment passed and then he realized nothing good was going to occur. There’s a particular look that bullies get when they realize they are in over their heads. I’ve seen it many times. It’s confusion, fear and resentful anger all mixed up together. I saw it on the pharmacist’s face as he handed me back my ID.

“I was just joking,” he said. They usually say that.

“I wasn’t,” I replied. “Now either fill my prescription or not. I don’t care.”

He filled my prescription and didn’t say another word to me. Never went back there again, though.

Are all pharmacists such dickheads? All the ones I’ve met have been — but that was the worst I’ve ever experienced.

So much that people have told me didn’t matter at all has turned out to matter incredibly much over the years. These are all concerns that I’ve brought up in places and was either outright banned, dismissed, or laughed at for attempting to discuss:

1) Ownership of information — DRM, copyright, and related topics. Roundly told it was just a “nerd distraction” from the “real issues.” Turns out it will be an epoch-defining issue for this century.

2) Inequality and wealth consolidation. Was told by both Dems and Repubs during the late 90s and through the oughts that this was irrelevant, unchangeable, a “natural feature” of capitalism and most people didn’t care about it. Probably led to the election of Trump and more importantly worsening lives for millions.

3) More than a year before the election, noticed that Hillary Clinton was the most disliked major candidate ever (likely to be) nominated by the Democrats. Well, see above.

4) Was advocating focusing research on solar and renewables in the early 2000s. Was told that solar and renewables would never amount to anything, were technologically impossible, and were too expensive to ever use anywhere.

5) I’d long been worried about the fragility of the financial system. Was told that a meltdown of the stock markets and the financial system similar to the 1930s was completely impossible — we’d solved that. Then 2008 occurred.

There are many more reasons, but those five are some major reasons I don’t trust experts even if I do listen to them in an advisory capacity.

Too often, their input information is erroneous, their incentives skewed to pilfering your wallet, and their conclusions therefore tailored to doing just that.

Economics is the most delusional pseudoscience.

It’s certainly not sociology nor psychology. Those are actual sciences, just not well-grounded ones in some areas and with more con artists than they should have.

I single out economics as the most delusional because it is the only one that not only has bogus conclusions but essentially as part of its very process fakes its own input data. This is not a matter of fraud (in the traditional sense) nor the lack of knowledge about how the real world works, but the fact there are immense incentives for economics to have both bogus front-end suppositions and back-end conclusions.

Thus the sclerotic state of economics as a profession today. We’d have a better time with charlatans, honestly. A charlatan at least knows she’s selling rubbish, while a true believer in economics realizes no such thing and all the more harm is caused therefrom.

The first 10 on today’s playlist.