Aram Zucker-Scharff

Why Germans pay cash for almost everything:

As banks, technology giants and would-be disruptors such as Square scrummage over the payment system of the future, German consumers seem perfectly happy with the payment system of the past. Germany remains one of the most cash-intensive advanced economies on earth. On average, wallets in Germany hold nearly twice as much cash—about $123 worth—as those in…

The German word for debt comes from the root word for guilt. Also, a pretty good discussion of ‘everyone’s favorite hyperinflation’. 

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“The problem with winners self-identifying as losers: once you’ve cast yourself as a victim in your own mind, there’s no need to interrogate your own behavior.

There is an alternative: solidarity. […]

I fear too that we have come to so thoroughly associate fandom with grievance that the two are now inextricable. That, I suspect, is the long-term consequence of the rise of the geeks: that we no longer know how to enjoy art without enjoying it against others. “

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– A really fascinating debate unit over at the New York Times. All the articles are really interesting, but this one hit a chord. Some of the phrasing (that headline…) is more meant to incite, but the underlying point… has a point.

10 Stupid Arguments People Use To Defend Comic Book Sexism:

Every time someone brings up the problem of sexism of the comics industry, there are always a few people who are oddly incensed. “It’s bullshit! A double standard! You’re the one with the issues!” they yell. They’re wrong on all counts. Here’s some helpful logic that proves why.

We can be better.

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But what happens if the culture is not there? What happens if the enthusiast community becomes so culturally polarized that it essentially becomes anti-content-innovation? What happens if it demands that games only be escapist fantasies? As I see it that’s what the fight over gamergate is really about. Whether games are more, or less.

Gamergate may want mechanical purity free of the sullying of media, but personally I feel that that is the wrong answer. Any answer that starts or ends with demands for games only to be looked at as products is a demand for a smaller rather than a larger universe. It’s a demand to be pleased at the expense of everyone else who might like to play a game but not engaged with the Gamer nation. It’s a demand that flies in the face of where all the rest of our culture is going and will continue to go. Their answer is reversion, but it can’t work.

For game makers the question is whether to buy into that Little Gaming view, or whether to reject it. If gamers are determined to become a smaller and ideological tribe than they already are, at some point the economics of buying them simply won’t make sense. Indeed they may already not.

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– The Gamergate Answer.