I've never seen an episode of Space Adventure He-Man, I don't even remember what it was called, but I had a bunch of toys from it when I was a kid that I'd scrounged up at yard sales and the like.

I had a lot of toys as a kid, but nearly all of them came from yard sales and flea markets. I was always a few years behind, and never really knew where the toys came from.

I just got the stuff that looked cool, you know?

You remember when they rebooted he-man, the first time, back in the late 80s, and transposed it in to a Space Adventure series?

The reason for this, of course, is as Pickety says "R>G"

Returns on Capital are greater than Economic Growth. Having money makes money faster than making money.

Marx looked at the same trends and called it the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to fall.

We're about to find out what happens when that inverts. Returns on Capital are slowing, and either economic activity will stop as a result, and people will starve, or people will fight.

It's going to be an interesting few years.

No company should be inescapably large.

Build a small thing that works and pays it's workers well and can survive forever.

Scale linearly, if at all.

Anything else is garbage.

A small thing that exists and sustains and pays it's workers a living wage but doesn't look to expand and consume and control the world is somehow Bad.

Fuck that.

I'm watching this Silicon Valley show on HBO, and I keep getting slapped in the face by this idea that, if you're not operating at scale you might as well not bother.

These companies aren't bootstrapping themselves, they're taking $100M checks at $5B valuations.

No company is worth $5B unless it is inescapably large.

I've been thinking about The Internet and The Economy over the last 50 years and I keep coming up against this idea that makes me want to scream.

Our entire economic system is built around this idea that a small, sustainable, profitable business is worthless, and that only a MASSIVE INTERDEPENDENT BEHEMOTH that grows larger with each passing quarter is acceptable.

Netflix can't ever lose any customers, ever, because they are operating at a scale where their debts are ridiculously high, and the only thing keeping them afloat is the fact that they show Growth quarter over quarter over quarter.

Seems like it wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility to do some kind of Activity Pub enabled store front?

Build some Activity Pub functionality in to a platform like WooCommerce.

All transactions would happen on the sellers personal sites. The federation functionality would be for discoverability, cross promotion, etc.

Federated, decentralized Etsy replacement when?

@calcifer even from a purely ideological standpoint, without the authority, they're suspect.

But yeah, I could see that. Shame that's never dealt with in the source.

@thegibson Having moved a Moon Patrol by myself a few times, I will say that it's vital to have somewhere to keep it that you will not have to move often.

@thegibson @ifixcoinops The vector art star wars cockpit is the only real coinop on my want list anymore.

But I am pretty pedestrian.

@rgegriff I have not!

@TerryHancock oh unquestionably.

It used to be that funding and distribution were equally hard problems, and sometimes with a unified solution.

Now funding is significantly harder, and distribution is "solved" except that it isn't really at all, so now Funding and Distribution are equally hard problems with barely any solution.

I hope to help do something about this, but it's going to take time, and it simply will not be enough.

Anyway, that's enough for tonight.

I have TV to make, and job activities to sunset, and so much to do.

Crowd funding could help immensely here. Short format narratives (you know, TV episodes) would also help ease production burdens and costs, and make releasing under an open license more possible and palatable, I think.

Ultimately, though, there isn't actually an answer beyond "Find Funding" and "Fix Distribution" and "kill the profit motive."

Oh! and if you watch a movie that was made outside the strictures of hollywood, tell me about it.

If you find an independent webTV show that isn't centrist or right wing pandering bullshit, tell me about that too.

I'll blog about it, if nothing else.

Whew, what a week.

It'll be easy, but it'll also be infuriating, until I manage to automate us out of this hole and transition the rest of this work away.

I don't want to re-assume responsibility for the technical operations team.

I handed it off because I had more work to do and also because I hated it.

But they guy I handed it off to has barely kept up, isn't automating, and doesn't say no to things.

His knowledge is more useful elsewhere, and I'm more effeceint than he is, so I'm taking back over while we sunset this group.