1. Imagine being on the receiving end of these shipments.

"Over the past few years, Fighters for a Free North Korea have used hydrogen balloons to pilot everything from radios to DVDs into the country, along with information about the outside world. It's a low-tech approach to disseminating information—but that's what makes it effective, according to its founders. This week, as the group behind the Sony hack stepped up its threats about Sony's forthcoming North Korea-skewering comedy The Interview, the Hollywood Reporter spoke to Thor Halvorssen, the author of The Atlantic piece and the founder of the Human Rights Foundation (a group that funds the drops). Halvorssen says that they'll be adding copies of The Interview to their airlifting operations 'as soon as possible.'" [Pocket]

+ At this point, the only question about the Sony hack is whether it's a William Gibson novel or a Black Mirror episode.

2. The credit-mule smartphone hustle.

"A picture slowly emerged of a so-called credit-mule scheme, ingenious in its simplicity and impressive in its reach. Middlemen such as Shamshad were dispatched to seemingly random American cities, where they trolled homeless shelters and halfway houses, offering $100 to anyone who would buy, on their behalf, a few on-contract phones from a local electronics store. Back in California, the contraband was handed off to Wen and Tan, who arranged to have the phones shipped to their contacts in Asia. The profit margin was enormous: In North America, wireless carriers typically subsidize the cost of our smartphones in order to lure us into multiyear voice and data contracts. To obtain a phone, in other words, we fork over a small fraction of the device’s actual market worth. Wen and Tan took advantage of the system by obtaining iPhones—through middlemen and mules—for $200 a pop, then selling them in China for close to $1,000." [Pocket]

3. A good overview of some possible implications of the Internet of Things from the NY Review of Books.

"Rather, the Internet’s third wave will be propelled by businesses that are able to rationalize their operations by replacing people with machines, using sensors to simplify distribution patterns and reduce inventories, deploying algorithms that eliminate human error, and so on. Those business savings are crucial to Rifkin’s vision of the Third Industrial Revolution, not simply because they have the potential to bring down the price of consumer goods, but because, for the first time, a central tenet of capitalism—that increased productivity requires increased human labor—will no longer hold. And once productivity is unmoored from labor, he argues, capitalism will not be able to support itself, either ideologically or practically." [Pocket]

4. A brief history of Seattle's so-far disastrous downtown tunnel megaproject.

"Like most megaprojects, the tunnel was sold to voters and city leaders through a rose-tinted fantasy that is already in shambles. But no city or state leader seems willing to reverse course. That is typical. One of the main reasons transportation megaprojects end up being such nightmares is that leaders are terrified of abandoning sunk costs. (Has the term 'sunk costs' ever been more apropos?) They will keep throwing public money down holes even as disasters unfold. Anything is better than admitting a catastrophic mistake."[Pocket]

5. The spreadsheets of terror.

"Our team has analyzed 144 of AQI’s and the ISI’s own financial and managerial documents. Captured by coalition and Iraqi forces between 2005 and 2010, these include scans of typed documents, as well as electronic files found on hard drives, USB sticks, and other media. Among them are spreadsheets listing the qualifications and training of hundreds of fighters, details on thousands of individual salary payments, and massive lists of itemized expenditures. There are also instructions outlining geographic areas of responsibility for subunits, memos suggesting minor changes to organizational structures, and periodic management reports of all kinds." [Pocket]

You may have noticed that I've abandoned the keywordy subject lines. I'm following the data. After I made the switch, open rates immediately dropped from the low-mid 50s to the mid-40s. The people like being surprised, I guess. Keeping the Pocket links for now, though the feedback has been mixed.

critique is happily in less common use now than it was in the sense of review & criticism. It is still used (properly) for a treatise on a subject (e.g. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason &c.).

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Unmoored from Labor, He Argues