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The Subtraction Economy

How they take more, give you less, and train you not to notice. Pour two fingers of the vodka you trusted ten years ago and you taste grain, cold, and a clean burn that meant something had been distilled with care. Pour the same brand today and you get water and a faint chemical ghost of that promise. The bottle looks identical and the price has climbed, while the liquid inside has been quietly reformulated down toward rotgut. A label held constant over a swapped recipe is the entire con, and the house is betting you will never run a blind taste test against a memory, because memory fades while the bottle on the shelf looks just like the one you loved.

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The Off Switch: When Money Becomes Permission

An all-digital economy promises a world without friction. The same design that makes payment effortless makes denial effortless, and it hands every government a quiet way to decide whether you may eat. Pay for coffee with a glance at your phone. Send rent across the country before the barista finishes the pour. Split a dinner bill at the table with no cash, no card, and no fuss. The case for a fully digital economy arrives wrapped in that smoothness, and the smoothness is real. The danger sits one layer underneath, in a question almost no one asks at the register: who has to approve this payment for it to clear, and what becomes of me on the day they decide not to?

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The Senator Who Used to Be Cory Booker

We taught at Rutgers-Newark in the same years, before he was mayor, before the Senate, before the rebranding. We shared a building lobby on University Avenue. I never shook his hand. I did not need to. Everyone on that campus knew Cory. He pulled the air toward him when he walked through a door, a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale-trained lawyer who had chosen Newark when he could have chosen Manhattan or Washington, a young man who spoke about education the way ministers speak about scripture. Students mattered to him. He believed a city scarred by Sharpe James and three decades of municipal corruption could be reformed from inside its worst housing project, into which he had moved on purpose. I watched that man hold a room without effort. He had a builder’s mind. He had, in the older sense of the word, character.

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Stop Paying Rent on Your Own Words!

Stop paying rent on your own words. For decades, writers were taught that “real” authors have representation, an agent, sometimes even a manager, as if legitimacy were a credential issued by an industry gatekeeper. That belief was formed in an older media economy: fewer publishers, fewer channels, slower production cycles, and a cultural aura around scarcity. In 2026, the belief is not merely old fashioned. It is often financially irrational, and for many authors it is the single most reliable way to give away a permanent slice of income that should remain theirs.

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The Sponsored Post Brigade

I’m not sure what’s going on with this blog, and my verified Facebook page, but over the last few months, I’ve been getting lots of requests — more than usual — to add paid links in my old articles as well as being offered “thousands of dollars” to post advertising on my Facebook page.

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If Not Adverts, Then What?

Too many of us are obsessed with the bottom line, making money, and taking advantage of others if it means increasing the balance of our bank accounts. America has always been about betterment — even if it means taking advantage of others to get there.

The American Way is no longer the American Dream, or home ownership, or education — no, the American Way is all about serving, and collecting, the mighty advertising dollar. Sell your eye for a penny; click your wrist for a nickel.

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Healthcare Hell: First Come, Last Served

We know the healthcare industry is broken, but one thing that has always been a mistaken mainstay in keeping our misbegotten minds and bodies in fit form — is the need to wade into an endless cesspool while attending a doctor’s office. Nay, the cesspool is not our infirm friends and brethren, but the very soggy pond in which we are all left to rot, in situ, for an appointment that shall never arrive.

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