Toldja!

Two weeks ago, I complained that the current Internet-fueled economy was destroying vastly more jobs than it was creating, and reshaping the entire landscape for careers in the future for the worse.

Today, the AP has the same story -- though, since it's reported by professionals (unlike my Internet-fueled amateur thought piece, which is actually a symptom of the problem) there are quotes and numbers and lots of backup detail.

Turns out we're all screwed, unless we do something unique, or are willing to do the kind of service jobs that can never be automated (shelf-stocker, waiter). Everyone who doesn't self-identify as an "artist" or "entrepreneur" might as well learn how to eat grass; our jobs and middle-class income will all disappear eventually.

Yet Another Datapoint That Copyright Terms Are Too Long

Far too many literary heirs are complete assholes with massively inflated opinions of the worth of their dead minor-poet fathers.

Hands up -- who had even heard of Louis Zukofsky before this moment?
[via Bookslut]

James Bond Daily: In Which Bond Is Wright

From pp.221-222 of Goldfinger, a novel published in 1959 and written by Ian Fleming, a man born in 1908:

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterson was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality.' As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits -- barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.

For comparison, note this 2009 work by John C. Wright, born 1961. And what's all this about progress, anyway?