You literally judged it by its title alone, but congratz on knowing how to say ad reductio.

Smaller e-ink displays are astronomically cheaper--I wonder if connecting several of them and then rastering the pdf would look much different?

The joins would have to very seamless. The visual presentation is the whole point of this thing, so you wouldn't want to ruin that.

These guys make it seem nice: https://www.visionect.com/blog/tiling-eink-displays/. It would probably be a pain to set up, though.

Why can't we make an effort to raise the height of the bottom rung of the ladder? In the case that we did, wouldn't charity then be unnecessary?

I didn't say it's not possible to raise the height. I said there always will be a bottom rung.

But if the "bottom rung" got to a certain height (i.e. food, shelter, healthcare) wouldn't further charity be unnecessary?

not GR? your name is, uh, evocative

I read a fair amount of Pynchon, but neither GR or the others jump out as having a "positive impact" on me. It's been too long, and I guess I'm not really clear on what that means. With some books I walk away with positive affirmations or a sense of better understanding. I suppose there was some of the latter, but not the same sort of catharsis. The world is dark and disgusting and confusing. I'd be lying if I said it didn't impact me though, which I'll grant, probably for the better.

I find Gravity's Rainbow to be, in it's ugly way, somehow life affirming. It's also very funny at times, which is always helpful, and very long which might help people right now.

Right now I think maybe people will appreciate being in a zone where the normal rules have ceased to apply (Allied occupied Europe in the novel), and where there is a lot of wrangling about who the winners and losers in the new world will be.

Ahh, indeed. Unlike the meritocratic private insurance industry, which definitely doesn't benefit from and encourage corruption, "centralized control of public health" would be a total waste of taxpayer money! It's not as if every country with a system like that is exponentially more functional and livable than those without!

Yes, if you care primarily about skimming the surface of things, collecting ideas you can bring up in conversation and being "up to date," books are totally overrated. Content aggregators fill that role much better. But if you actually want to get back into reading as a hobby I would recommend starting with some easy-to-read fiction.

Great game--I think it would a little better if you had to pay each employee a salary, just to give it something of a challenge factor.

>Given the narrative of rent extraction, you'd expect the declines in labor share of income to have happened during the long period of deregulation, reduced antitrust enforcement, etc., starting in the 1970s.

The point of this article is to complicate that very narrative by identifying how increased regulations actually serve the interests of concentrated wealth.