I find it both hilarious that English is now the lingua franca of world commerce, and that that’s the term for it in English. It’s fitting, though, since I figure that the way English ransacks borrows from other languages is both a cause and effect of its success.

There’s nobody selling cake in my car. What have I done wrong?!

Not to be fatalistic deliberately, but what can we do about it? If we try to take on the system individually, we face the Plucky Ninja problem. If we try to coordinate, it’s too big a movement to keep secret, so the rich and powerful can subvert it before we get anywhere. (They’re doing a pretty good job of it already.)

Tangentially, if we could support everybody at the medieval peasant level without work, well, why don’t we? By which I mean, let’s institute a Universal Basic Income. What a familiar, yet so profoundly different, world it would be if you didn’t have to worry about having a safe (although Spartan) place to live, clean water to drink, basic, nutritious food to eat, and care if you get hurt or sick, no matter what. You’d still have to work for all the modern luxuries.

I guess the workers would have leverage against abusive, exploitative employers, if the cost of quitting a bad situation was simply not going to Paris this year, rather than life-or-death struggle, and we can’t have that!