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They’ll kill ya on the margin

Heh. A guy from the Monochom art collective put together a photographic flip-book in which he goes to a currency-exchange outlet, exchanges 50 euros to dollars, takes the result, changes that back into euros, takes that result, changes it back into dollars, and continues on and on until it’s all gone — eaten up by transaction fees. You’re sort of wondering where is this all going?, until you get to the end and the marxist hammer comes down:

“Now we have seen how that portion of the constant capital which consists of the instruments of labour, transfers to the production only a fraction of its value, while the remainder of that value continues to reside in those instruments.” (Karl Marx)

Hardly subtle — and hardly an inarguable point — but made me chuckle anyway.

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

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“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

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May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson