Anyway, I agree completely that B&N isn’t going out of business anytime soon. It’s interesting to look at what Amazon is doing: even as they’re becoming a better bookseller with the e-reader business, Amazon has entrenched itself as a retailer of an impressively diverse set of products.

The bottom line is that the businesses that survive will be those that adapt continuously.

(Man, it’s been a while since I left a comment on a blog. *shakes fist at twitter and facebook*)

Particularly in the criminology/sociology literature is the idea of social control, that having enough people who know you or who are at least keeping an eye out on you or for you can be enough to curb crime. One of the studies I read said neighbors really only needed to see each other once a year (such as at a neighborhood cookout) for there to be a significant drop in burglaries and robberies.

I wonder if, by creating a personal community of long-time friends, we’re creating a form of social control for ourselves. That can be bad as well as good, but it does kind of externalize the ideals we’d like to think we believe in. (But then when you leave a community…when I stopped attending Southern Baptist churches, I lost touch with many people I’d grown up with.)

Has it also not occured to him that it is work like Ehrenreich’s (written a decade ago) that might have actually affected conditions in these sorts of work places?

Platt sounds frustrating…almost intentionally dense. But i’ve never liked boing-boing much.