Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
I Was Also Right About Carbs
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2004 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Bruce Sterling said,
I have plants at the party. Who are there secretly and sort of organized with one another. And they aren't really made clear to the party members that they are there at all. They are covertly there. They are covertly organized. They have secret handshakes and recognition symbols.I remember, when I was very young, I thought a similar scheme could stop the stock market from crashing or boiling over. A cadre would buy when everyone else was selling, and sell when everyone else was buying. People told me that such a scheme was unnecessary, since markets self-correct and investors act like that anyway. Now I believe that the pool of investors does not contain enough contrarians, and that probably buyers-in to my childhood fantasy would do well by doing good.What is their job? Their job is to monitor the party and see if enthusiasm is moving into an area of untoward radicalism. So they don't do anything blatant. What they do is stage small but effective party spoiling scenes.
