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I don’t go to retail stores often, but I recently went to several, and I notice a very disturbing trend; they are getting rid of cashiers. I will not tolerate this. If I owned stock in a retailer, then I would be even more annoyed with this trend. I wasn’t surprised to see that Wal-Mart is going with those business killers, just as I wasn’t surprised that Home Depot started using them a few years ago; they were clearly for overflow and to speed some contractors through. But I was surprised to see ...

Misanthropy is a general hatred, loathing, or disdain for the human species and/or human nature, and there are many good reasons for misanthropy. Like Swift I am not claiming that all humans are worthy of hate, mistrust, or disdain, but as a whole the human species is. Very nearly all problems that people have are results of human actions. The world almost surely would be a better place without most humans.
Dean Jonathan Swift described misanthropy quite nicely in his letter to Alexander ...

Sticks and Stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

This is a piece that I started during the Boston Marathon last month. Fundamentally, this is about rhetoric, speech, especially speech that is intended to persuade.
There are two sides to that old adage; although it is usually used to show scorn for those who use foul language and insults, but it is also a suggestion to remain non-violent. I suppose that the bombs that were set off at the finish of the Boston ...

Over the decades I have noticed a lot of loose talk about the “Middle Class”. Most recently I read something by a computer geek who claims that computers eliminated the Middle Class. My immediate comment was that the MC was doomed to decline from its first moment. After further consideration, I realized that the problem is with definition. What has been called the MC since WW II may be near the middle of the socio economic spectrum, but is what was more accurately called the Working Class, and that ...

The shape of government will change everywhere after the Great Pandemic will decrease population by 80%, and the politics involved with the governments will also change. Teasing apart the results of the changes is difficult, and it is likely that new elements will arise, but the general political culture of most countries would be unchanged, and that means that there will be cut-throat politics in the U.S. Just as one can read the political satires of Jonathan Swift from the early 18th centuries ...