It’s okay with me if you don’t have that much to say.

We’re going to start this one out by sending you over to youtube in another tab to play “Wave of Mutilation” by the pixies.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Economist always has awesome pictures. The cover this week does not disappoint. It is a black hole with the words “Be Afraid” in the middle. This cover image reminds me of the one of a guy stepping off a cliff that was run shortly after the Lehman collapse in ’08, before it was completely clear how screwed we all were.

So I think that the editorial statement here is, “bend over again”.

In other news Amazon fired a big salvo in the Apple/Google/Amazon/Microsoft war this week with the new Kindle line up announcement. They are bringing it with a $79 e-ink kindle and a $199 color tablet. This matters because Amazon has proven that it is good at selling shopping carts for digital content.

“Why do I care about e-books” you say. You care because every time someone buys a digitally distributed product that has no incremental production cost the economy grows in a distinctly non-zero sum manner. Monetizing content is the future of economic growth. Driving the distribution costs of content to nothing enables previously marginalized populations that had no mechanism for selling anything to people with money to productively engage with society and put food on the table.

Cutting arts education funding is really bad because that is one of the first groups that can move out of poverty in any population. It seems to me that this is now more true than ever.

So Anyway, I hope Amazon “wins”, or at least succeeds, because they are the most transparent schleppers of content right now.

And in case you are wondering, Apple did do one of the greatest public services of the last decade by getting people to buy music again. Now we just need to keep creating new forms of content for people to purchase.