Category: Sociology
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Real estate investing is exacerbating income inequality
Have you met Kevin? Kevin, i.e. Kevin Paffrath, has a YouTube channel, says he’s a millionaire and will help you get started in real estate investing so you can be a millionaire too. He’s handsome, reasonably young and looks overly caffeinated. The same is true of Graham Stephan who while being a millionaire still lives…
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Religion is failing us, Part One
We just finished Season 2 of NBC’s series The Good Place, which we are watching on Netflix. It’s a comedy of sorts on the afterlife, more specifically on our views of the afterlife. In this version, pretty much everyone ends up in “The Bad Place”, i.e. Hell. Four clearly flawed not so good people end…
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Playing Dr. Larch
“Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should…
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Invest in innovation, not exploitation
America is a supposedly country that rewards innovation. The trouble is, a lot of this innovation is really exploitation. I looked into this briefly a few posts back when I looked at Lyft and Uber’s “innovation”. The only really innovative part about these ride services is their app. They’re both cheaper and generally faster than…
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The gig economy model is exploitative and unsustainable
I took my first Lyft ride the other day. I am pleased to say that the technology worked great! I picked up my luggage at baggage claim at Bradley International near Hartford, opened my Lyft app and within two minutes a driver was flagging me down and I was on my way home. I arrived…
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The Tumblr brouhaha shows again that the Internet is not free
So my daughter and spouse both have Tumblr accounts. In case you weren’t aware, Tumblr is a blogging/social media site. Both my wife and daughter are LGBTQ-friendly but I had not really tuned in that people like them haunted Tumblr because it is, or was, LGBTQ-friendly. All that changed Monday when Tumblr announced that effective…
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Pope Francis: let priests be people and this clergy abuse problem will largely disappear
Catholic clerical abuse, mostly of minors, is hardly news. And yet this week such a story broke through to the front pages for a change, mainly because it gave us an understanding of the truly vast scope of the problem. Yesterday, a grand jury issued a report saying an estimated 300 Catholic priests in the…
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Evangelicals rooting for Armageddon
On April 29, I inconveniently pointed out that most Christians in America are acting like the devil. Jesus himself seemed to be aware that people have this tendency, which is captured in the Bible in Luke 6:42 and Matthew 7:3: How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of…
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There is no Planet B
When I have time to fill in my retirement, I can easily spend it among the endless documentaries on YouTube. I have spent a lot of my free time watching videos on space-time. Space-time is the matrix in which we live and it’s very much a real thing. There is no way to separate space…
Occam's Razor 