Happy Solar New Year sun people, Happy Lunar New Year moon people! For those of you who aren't Seldoms fans, know that this installment's title is an extremely oblique reference to that erstwhile effort: 'What I Did With My Friend Last Summer'. And it will now slide directly into greater obscurity. Because what I did was mainly gape in disbelief. And what I'll be doing now is probably not something I'm permitted to talk about.

Somewhere, sometime I'm certain I mentioned that greed isn't good. It really isn't. Almost by definition. And yet gibberish drivelers continue to go on about the magical mystery market and the importance of business value. Business has no values. If you haven't actually read Adam Smith, allow me to assure you he is more than a effective soporific. He intended to be a moral philosopher. And his invisible hand had nothing to do with how your pursuit of unbridled self-interest was going to make life wonderful for everyone and everything. I'm not going to explain what he was talking about, you can go read it yourself. Come back after your nap.

For those few of you who have not been following this blog over the past decades, know that I was there when Mount Sinai and the NYU medical school outsourced their IT operations. Outsourcing is a fantastic way to maximize shareholder value, both by enforcing precarity on the local workforce and for allowing offshore folks, generally with few rights and fewer opportunities, to do much of the work at relatively slavish wages.

Outsourcing is terrible for the local economy. Shareholders are irrelevant to that. Given New York's proximity to Wall Street I got to see the Laffer curve definitively disproved. It is also terrible for customers and clients. They get neither the commitment of a devoted workforce nor the economic benefits of those people spending their wages in the local community. But this is all irrelevant to the rentiers and the investor class. Fifteen years after I watched MSNYU go down the tubes I got to see the same mistakes of greed and shortsightedness repeated at UIUC. There is always money for the right people, of course. But austerity must be enforced upon everyone else.

I do so hope you make enough to be happy. Of course, those silly scientists and their simpleminded studies say money, beyond the sufficient, doesn’t make us happy. O, but you know better ye managerial geniuses, do you not? Why you toe the neoliberal line which benefits neither the starving, the struggling, the satisfied, nor even those hyper-intelligent greed-heads whose guard dogs (lapdogs in pointed fact, but that unpacking will require some thin slicing, which instructions are in the book and ya still ain’t bought one, haveya?) you are. So tell me again how democracy is only for a certain entitled class. Did I tell you the joke about the Reaganphile who instructed his broker to make him some money?

My relationship with The Seldoms was both a formative experience in the realms of unpopular music, and an early exposure to the phenomenon of agism. Working in IT these days also demonstrates the latter, although in a reversed direction. Now that I'm relatively old I'm neither cool enough for music nor compsci.

I am comforted by my lack of hope. I am a happy misanthrope. This species no more deserves to exist than, say, some ethnonationalist neocolony. The latter might persist via egregious acts of violence. Well, the former too for that matter. But the fact that the fertile crescent no longer is lets me relax. Now that thought is eclipsed by nonsense, science is being outlawed and the commons fully privatized I am confident that it's all going to work out just fine.

Mmm, OK, yeah, bloggily stuff. I made some beer, moved to Chicago and Mom died. Not in that order.