Link sausages long past their sell-by dates.
- One of the myths of American politics is that former military officers are uniformly pro-use-of-force right-wingers, these days almost always Heffalumps. "These days," naturally, extends back to the 1960s; before that, not so much with the party identity. It's a myth with much less basis in reality than most. Officers' pasts change their perceptions of the present… and the future. And see? I didn't even need to use myself as a counterexample this time.
- Speaking of outright myths, consider photographs of fairies… which, when you come right down to it, represents misuse of myth for personal advantage and enrichment. In that sense, "Fairies Living at the Bottom of the Garden" is an interesting precursor of the "prosperity gospel" movement, isn't it? (And this auction is, itself, a fascinating and unintended indictment of the visual-arts myth that an "original" has inherently greater value than a faithful authorized copy.)
- Then there's the myth of the predictability of future scholarship, and how advances change scholarship. A look into the past demonstrates this pretty definitively: What was the (or even the most-important-among-several) change in "scholarship" that led to the acceptability of postmodernism as a scholarly focus? (Hint: It's not found anywhere in the humanities, but was imported into the humanities by smart people studying the past of another field of scholarship who understood less about it than they thought they did.)
- All of which beats misuse of the 1%er music of the past. Look, I'm a serious classical music listener and once more than that… but I knew perfectly well, even four decades ago, that we're dealing with music that has survived largely unaltered for a couple of centuries (or thereabouts) because the difficulty of transcribing musical thoughts was subsidized — patronized — by the 1% of its time. Even the classical composers who, beginning in the nineteenth century (with extraordinarily rare exceptions before then), acknowledged their debts to folk music — Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt being among the most prominent — transformed the material into a form acceptable to the 1%.
- And then there's the past of bad law profession practices (especially, but not only, billing) and the past of bad accounting/managerial mythmaking (automation is always cheaper than paying people to do the job right the first time, and just about everything can be divorced from human judgment and skill) that are potentially destroying the future of e-commerce platforms. This particular story (which resurfaced recently) reflects two horrifying failures by Amazon that are reflected all across e-commerce; Etsy, eBay, et al. are actually far worse. Not only does the overautomation of responses to complaints about IP piracy make it easy for schemes like this one to work (especially in velocity-driven contexts), but it makes it much more difficult for actual rightsholders who are victims to take down the pirates.
But it's not efficient to pay young lawyers to sit around waiting for complaints, let alone give them the training that they can't get in law school or anywhere else to actually recognize and evaluate validity, soundness, etc. It's not even efficient to pay somewhat experienced paralegals to work under the supervision of a young lawyer. So it doesn't get done… meaning that Amazon is externalizing a cost inherent in its business model, which is by definition a market failure — not a demonstration of how everything should be run on private profit principles that spread the benefits unequally in favor of preexisting capital inputs. That is, again, an idea from the past, but almost nobody actually reads the source material and instead of relying on the invisible hand, relies on the invisible middle finger.